The Role
As a Sr Software Engineer for Cloud Ops, you'll support AI platform operations by ensuring reliable, secure scalable operations on AWS, driving automation, mentoring engineers, and improving incident response processes.
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 Software Engineer Global supporting the AI Platform Operations Pod with a Cloud Ops focus, you’ll help ensure Southwest’s AI and agentic platforms operate reliably, securely, and efficiently at scale. This role combines deep cloud engineering with SRE practices, owning L2/L3 operations for production AI workloads on AWS while driving automation and resilience across distributed systems. You’ll work hands‑on with cloud‑native services and containerized platforms—using Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, and strong observability practices to detect issues early, respond effectively to incidents, and deliver permanent improvements that reduce repeat failures. Partnering closely with AI Platform, Security, and Product Teams, you’ll balance reliability, cost, and security for non‑deterministic AI systems—an emerging and high‑impact discipline. You’ll also mentor other Engineers and promote “shift‑left” quality by strengthening runbooks, alerts, testing, and operational readiness, helping ensure Southwest’s AI platforms continue to deliver consistent value as they evolve.
Responsibilities
- Drive the technical direction and feature roadmap of large-scale cloud systems
- Serve as a technical lead contributing to and directing the efforts of development teams, including internal and external team members
- Determines operational feasibility by evaluating analysis, problem definition, requirements, solution development, and proposed solutions
- Drives detailed definition of feature requirements through discussions with product managers and customers
- Supports continuous improvement by investigating alternatives and new technologies
- Prepares and installs solutions by determining and designing system specifications, standards, and programming
- Evaluates code to ensure that it is valid, is properly structured, meets industry standards, and is compatible with browsers, devices, or operating systems
- Mentor Software Engineers to allow for skill/knowledge development through advice, coaching, and training opportunities
- Update job knowledge by studying state-of-the-art development tools, programming techniques and computing equipment; participating in educational opportunities; reading professional publications; maintaining personal networks; participating in professional organizations
- May perform other job duties as directed by Employee's Leaders
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Advanced knowledge of software development methodologies, practices, concepts, and technologies obtained through formal training and / or work experience
- Proactively shares knowledge and skills of software development and testing to solve a range of problems
- Advanced knowledge of at least one required programming language
- Excellent partnering, communication, negotiation skills, and execution in working with various Technology or partner Teams
- Ability to articulate (verbally / visually) ideas, approach, concepts, options, risk, impact, and provides guidance to technical, non-technical, and Leadership audiences
- Ability to lead multiple assignments, whether administrative or project related, while maintaining a successful level of completion in all responsible work
- Ability to mentor others
- Ability to lead ideating, presentations, mentoring and group-thinking sessions
- Ability to influence without authority
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 software development and methodologies
- 3+ years in Incident response—blameless post-mortems, RCA, MTTR reduction
- 3+ years in Observability—Datadog/CloudWatch/OTel, dashboards, alerts, runbooks
- 4+ years in Cloud-native AWS—EKS/ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, networking
- 4+ years in strong Python or Java for ops automation and L3 fixes
- 5+ years in production support / SRE on AWS at scale—incidents, on-call, SLOs
- 5-6 years of relevant work-related experience
- Preferred: Experience in:
- Hands-on AWS Bedrock/SageMaker ops
- GPU infra ops—batching, autoscaling, cost tuning
- IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation) hands-on
- Service mesh (Istio/App Mesh), API GW, WAF
- Secure ops for PII/regulated data
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
- Advanced-level experience in software development and methodologies
- 3+ years in Incident response--blameless post-mortems, RCA, MTTR reduction
- 3+ years in Observability--Datadog/CloudWatch/OTel, dashboards, alerts, runbooks
- 4+ years in Cloud-native AWS--EKS/ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, networking
- 4+ years in strong Python or Java for ops automation and L3 fixes
- 5+ years in production support / SRE on AWS at scale--incidents, on-call, SLOs
- 5-6 years of relevant work-related experience
- Hands-on AWS Bedrock/SageMaker ops
- GPU infra ops--batching, autoscaling, cost tuning
- IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation) hands-on
- Service mesh (Istio/App Mesh), API GW, WAF
- Secure ops for PII/regulated data
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.
