Department:
TechnologyOur Company Promise
We are committed to provide our Employees a stable work environment with equal opportunity for learning and personal growth. Creativity and innovation are encouraged for improving the effectiveness of Southwest Airlines. Above all, Employees will be provided the same concern, respect, and caring attitude within the organization that they are expected to share externally with every Southwest Customer.
Job Description:
About Us
At Southwest Airlines, we believe that flying should feel like freedom. For over 50 years, we’ve been connecting people to what matters most with low fares, legendary hospitality, and a heart for service. Our culture is built on the principles of fun, friendliness, and family, making us one of the most admired workplaces in the world.
If you’re passionate about making a difference, love working in a fast-paced environment, and want to help millions of travelers reach their destinations with a smile, Southwest Airlines is the place for you. Here, your career can truly take flight.
Job Summary
As a Manager Technology – Redshift, you'll lead the AWS Redshift Platform team, driving technical strategy, platform reliability, scalability, cost optimization, and stakeholder management for the enterprise and departmental Redshift environments.
In this role, you'll provide People-focused leadership to a high-performing Engineering Team while driving the delivery of scalable, secure, and reliable cloud-based data solutions built on modern AWS technologies and DevOps practices.
The Redshift Platform team owns, manages, administers, and evolves the Redshift platform for Southwest Airlines Enterprise and Departmental analytics environments, powering machine learning and AI initiatives. The organization is data-driven, and Technology manages how data is collected, stored, and exposed across the enterprise using modern cloud architectures, tooling with a DevOps mindset.
Your work will directly enable data-driven decision-making across the enterprise while fostering the growth of both your team and the technology capabilities that support Southwest's long-term success.
Model the Southwest Way
Guide and lead team members using SWA talent management practices to coach, develop, and engage employees
- Adhere to Company values and competencies to foster a culture of inclusion, recognition, and support of a safe work environment
- Invest in leadership and self-growth through participating in continuous learning and development
- Lead, support, and influence the achievement of the mission, goals and objectives of the department and organization
- Participate fully in organizational processes and initiatives, i.e. performance management, interviewing, budgeting, training, etc.
- Lead the resolution of organization, team and individual issues, making appropriate decision
- Develop and execute strategies and processes to improve performance and the value of products and services provided
- Lead cross-functional Teams to deliver solutions and services to meet enterprise needs
- Provide Technical thought Leadership related to assigned functional areas
- Deliver technology solutions using best practices to achieve maximum Team productivity while delivering high quality products
- Stay abreast of emerging trends, processes, and solutions related to assigned responsibilities
- Build strong, collaborative relationships and credibility while influencing and driving change across respective Business and Technology Teams
- Work with Technology and business partners to measure financial benefits and demonstrable business value
- Owns the Redshift platform strategy and roadmap, aligned to enterprise analytics, ML, and AI needs.
- Provides People leadership – hiring, mentoring, and growing engineers, tech leads as well as other roles; owns performance management and career development; builds a culture centered on engineering excellence, ownership, accountability, and data quality.
- Provides technical leadership in Redshift architecture, SQL performance tuning, AWS cloud services, infrastructure automation, and platform reliability, security, and governance.
- Stakeholder management – translates business needs into platform capabilities, manages expectations across data consumers (analytics, ML, finance, compliance), and communicates platform value, priorities and risks to executive audiences.
- Drives strategy and prioritization – roadmap planning aligned to business priorities, balancing platform stability against new feature delivery, and managing technical debt deliberately.
- Champions Lakehouse architecture and the broader AWS data ecosystem (Glue, Lake Formation, Athena, S3, Step Functions).
- Drives FinOps discipline and cost efficiency across AWS Redshift, and owns capacity/cost management for the Redshift platform.
- Establishes and maintains observability, reliability, and an SRE-driven operating model for the Redshift platform.
- Accountable for delivering a reliable, scalable, and business-ready Redshift platform through collaboration with architecture, governance, security, and engineering teams.
- Drive AI-enabled transformation across the Redshift platform by identifying and implementing automation opportunities that reduce manual effort, improve operational efficiency, accelerate delivery timelines, and generate measurable cost savings.
- Leads Redshift platform reliability initiatives, incident management, and cross-functional operational excellence.
- May perform other job duties as directed by Employee's Leaders
- Knowledge of business/Leadership principals, including planning, organizing, directing, developing, and supervising
- Knowledge of personnel practices and regulations
- Knowledge of software development practices, concepts, methodologies, tools and trends
- Proficient knowledge of project management methodologies
- Skilled in excellent partnering, negotiation and communication in order to facilitate interactions with business Customers and technology teams
- Ability to provide tactical leadership for Team(s)
- Ability to use appropriate motivation and influence techniques to achieve desired Team results
- Ability to set and manage stakeholder expectations
- Ability to deliver quality projects on time and within budget
- Ability to manage projects using the organization's project management methodology
- Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field and/or equivalent formal training
- Demonstrated experience in directly or indirectly leading team(s)
- Fully functioning, broad knowledge in:
- Business and/or Information Technology environment
- Leading teams and providing work direction
- 8-12 years relevant work-related / leadership experience
- AWS Redshift – Platform ownership, architecture, and roadmap accountability. Deep expertise in Amazon Redshift including Serverless, Spectrum, Data Sharing, Workload Management (WLM), Concurrency Scaling, and performance optimization.
- AWS Cloud – Core AWS services as S3, IAM Identity Center, Athena, Lake Formation, and Lakehouse architecture patterns.
- Lakehouse Architecture – 3–5 years – AWS core services and Lakehouse architecture patterns
- Observability / SRE – Reliability and SRE-oriented thought process for the Redshift platform
- FinOps / Cost Optimization – Contract management and FinOps practices for the platform
- SQL – Strong expertise in query optimization, workload management, and performance tuning within large-scale analytics platforms
- Security & Governance – IAM, encryption, access controls, Lake Formation permissions, Identity Centre, and compliance-oriented platform management
- Python - Working knowledge for platform automation, observability, and operational tooling
- Infrastructure Automation – Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and platform automation.
- Stakeholder Management – 5 years – translating business needs into platform capabilities and executive communication of platform value/risk
Preferred:
- Data Governance – Semantic layer, metadata management, and business glossary experience
- Metadata / Semantic Layer / Business Glossary – Supporting enterprise data governance initiatives
- ServiceNow Change Management – Enterprise change management processes
- Agile / SAFe – Enterprise adoption strategy and Agile delivery frameworks
- Vendor & Contract Management – 3+ years – cross-continental engineering management and vendor oversight
- Enterprise Data Platforms – Exposure to modern analytics and enterprise data platforms
- Incident Management – Cross-team collaboration and incident response leadership
- Airline / Travel Industry Experience – Large enterprise IT exposure
- Must meet confidentiality expectations as to confidential, proprietary and sensitive Company information
- Ability to work extended hours as needed
Southwest Airlines is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
Please print/save this job description because it won't be available after you apply.
Skills Required
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, a related field, or equivalent formal training
- Experience directly or indirectly leading teams
- 8-12 years of relevant work-related or leadership experience
- Deep AWS Redshift expertise, including platform ownership, architecture, roadmap accountability, Serverless, Spectrum, Data Sharing, WLM, Concurrency Scaling, and performance optimization
- Broad knowledge of business and information technology environments
- Experience leading teams and providing work direction
- 3-5 years of AWS core services and Lakehouse architecture experience
- Experience with observability and SRE-oriented platform reliability
- FinOps and platform cost optimization experience
- Strong SQL expertise in query optimization, workload management, and performance tuning
- Security and governance experience with IAM, encryption, access controls, Lake Formation permissions, Identity Center, and compliance-oriented platform management
- Working knowledge of Python for platform automation, observability, and operational tooling
- Experience with infrastructure automation, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and platform automation
- 5 years of stakeholder management experience translating business needs into platform capabilities and communicating platform value and risk to executives
- Data governance, semantic layer, metadata management, and business glossary experience
- ServiceNow change management experience
- Agile or SAFe enterprise adoption and delivery framework experience
- 3+ years of vendor and contract management experience
- Exposure to modern enterprise data and analytics platforms
- Cross-team incident response and incident management leadership experience
- Airline or travel industry experience
- Ability to work extended hours as needed
Southwest Airlines Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Southwest Airlines and has not been reviewed or approved by Southwest Airlines.
-
Pay Growth & Progression — Pay progression is described as materially improving after major 2024 union agreements, especially for pilots and flight attendants. Compensation satisfaction is framed as stronger over time as step scales and seniority accumulate.
-
Retirement Support — Retirement support stands out through a dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match and the presence of profit-sharing contributions that can add to retirement savings. Stock purchase access is also positioned as an additional ownership-oriented component of total rewards.
-
Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Wellbeing and lifestyle value is elevated by extensive space-available travel privileges and broad travel-related discounts that can materially offset personal travel costs. Recognition mechanisms like points-based rewards are also positioned as an added lifestyle-oriented perk.
Southwest Airlines Insights
What We Do
At Southwest Airlines we connect People to what’s important in their lives—that also means connecting our Employees to what’s important in their lives! Our Employees value the opportunity to work hard, be creative, and have fun on the job. Southwest Airlines recognizes, respects, and values differences. By fostering a culture that embraces and utilizes our diversity, we create competitive advantages in teamwork and innovation that contribute to our overall success.
