The Role
As a Senior Data Engineer, you will build and manage data pipelines for AI workloads, ensure data quality, and enhance infrastructure scalability while collaborating with various stakeholders.
Summary Generated by Built In
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:
As a Sr Data Engineer Global supporting Southwest’s AI Platform Operations, you’ll build and operate the data pipelines that power production AI workloads at scale. This role focuses on solving complex data challenges by designing reliable, observable, and scalable data infrastructure using modern AWS data services and cloud‑native practices. You’ll own pipeline performance and data quality end‑to‑end—monitoring, troubleshooting, and tuning systems while implementing retraining pipelines and data‑quality checks that keep AI models and agentic systems performing as data evolves. Beyond day‑to‑day operations, you’ll lead meaningful platform enhancements by redesigning infrastructure for scalability, improving lineage and observability, and automating manual processes. Working closely with Data, Product, Engineering, and Executive Stakeholders, you’ll apply strong judgment and technical expertise to deliver trusted data foundations that enable Southwest’s AI platforms to deliver consistent, high‑value outcomes across the Company.
Responsibilities
- Assemble large, complex sets of data that meet non-functional and functional business requirements
- Identify, design and implement internal process improvements including re-designing infrastructure for greater scalability, optimizing data delivery, and automating manual processes
- Build required infrastructure for optimal extraction, transformation and loading of data from various data sources using AWS and SQL technologies
- Build analytical tools to utilize the data pipeline, providing actionable insight into key business performance metrics including operational efficiency and customer acquisition
- Work with stakeholders including data, design, product and executive teams and assisting them with data-related technical issues
- Work with stakeholders including the Executive, Product, Data and Design teams to support their data infrastructure needs while assisting with data-related technical issues
- Generate or adapt equipment and technology to serve user needs
- May perform other job duties as directed by Employee's Leaders
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Knowledge of the practical application of engineering science and technology, including applying principles, techniques, procedures, and equipment to the design and production of various goods and services
- Knowledge of design techniques, tools, and principles involved in production of precision technical plans, blueprints, drawings, and models
- Ability to use logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems
- Ability to understand the implications of new information for both current and future problem-solving and decision-making
- Skilled in identifying complex problems and reviewing related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions
- Ability to recognize when an issue has occurred or is likely to occur, without needing to diagnose or resolve the problem.
- Ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events)
- Ability to switch efficiently between multiple tasks or information sources, such as spoken instructions, system alerts, or data inputs.
- Ability to organize data or actions in a defined sequence or structure based on specified rules or patterns (e.g., numerical, textual, visual, or mathematical sequences).
- Ability to recognize defined patterns—such as shapes, words, or signals—even when they are embedded within distracting or complex information.
Education
- Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field and/or equivalent formal training
Experience
- Required: Advanced level experience, seasoned and specialized knowledge in Cloud infrastructure, DataLake
- 5-7 years of relevant work-related experience
- ETL experience ensuring source to target data integrity
- Various filetypes (Delimited Text, Fixed Width, XML, JSON, Parque)
- ServiceBus, setting up ingress and egress within a subscription, or relevant AWS Cloud services administrative experience
- Unit Testing, Code Quality tools, CI/CD Technologies, Security and Container Technologies
- Agile development experience and Agile ceremonies and practices
- 5+ years of experience with production data engineering—pipelines, warehousing, observability
- 4+ years of experience with Snowflake/Redshift/BigQuery + Airflow/Glue/dbt in production
- 2+ years of experience with data quality, lineage, observability tooling (Monte Carlo, Great Expectations, OpenLineage)
- 3+ years of experience with AWS data services—Glue, EMR, Kinesis, S3, Athena
- 3+ years of experience in Python for data ops; CI/CD and IaC for data pipelines
- Preferred experience in:
- Data contracts, schema registry, governance tooling
- Spark/Databricks experience for batch retraining workloads
- Lakehouse formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi)
- Experience supporting ML/AI feature stores, model registries, or vector DBs
- Streaming systems—Kafka, Kinesis—at scale
Other Qualifications
- 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.
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Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field
- 5-7 years of relevant work-related experience in cloud infrastructure and data engineering
- 5+ years of experience with production data engineering including pipelines, warehousing, and observability
- 3+ years of experience with AWS data services including Glue, EMR, Kinesis, S3, Athena
- 2+ years of experience with data quality, lineage, observability tooling
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Company
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.
