Developer - Information Technology

United Airlines · Chicago · $89,965–$117,212 (stated in the posting)

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Description

Position Summary

We are seeking a Software Engineer to design, build, and support cloud native services, APIs, and AI enabled capabilities across our enterprise application portfolio. This is a hands on engineering role for someone who writes production code, owns delivery end to end, and raises the engineering bar for the teams around them.

You will build the services and interfaces that connect cloud, SaaS, ERP, and internally developed applications, develop reusable platform capabilities that other engineering teams build on, and help application teams adopt them. You will also build AI enabled features, including services backed by large language models, tool calling, and agentic workflows.

The role supports Procurement and other enterprise portfolios, and contributes to our broader cloud, API, event driven, and AI objectives.

Key Responsibilities

Design, develop, test, deploy, and support production services on AWS, including APIs, event driven components, message flows, background processing, and data interfaces connecting cloud, SaaS, ERP, and internal applications
Own complex technical initiatives end to end: requirements, solution design, build, test, deployment, stabilization, and ongoing support
Build reusable services, components, frameworks, and implementation patterns that other application teams consume, reducing one off point to point interfaces and improving delivery consistency
Provide technical guidance to application teams adopting shared platform services, reviewing their designs, resolving dependencies, and holding them to security and engineering standards
Build and extend AI enabled capabilities, including integration with large language model APIs, structured output handling, tool and function calling, retrieval, evaluation, and guardrails
Write clean, secure, well tested, well documented code. Lead design and code reviews and hold a high quality bar
Establish and promote engineering standards for API design, messaging, data transformation, exception handling, retries, idempotency, reconciliation, logging, monitoring, and operational support
Contribute to platform architecture, API lifecycle management, system design, scalability, resiliency, observability, and technology roadmaps
Use AI assisted development tools fluently to accelerate delivery, while independently reviewing and validating everything they produce against our engineering, security, privacy, and quality standards
Troubleshoot complex production issues across services, APIs, messaging, databases, and cloud infrastructure. Perform root cause analysis and implement permanent fixes
Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment automation, infrastructure as code, and observability tooling
Provide technical direction and mentorship. Communicate design decisions and tradeoffs clearly to engineers, architects, product partners, and leadership
Work closely with product, architecture, security, infrastructure, DevOps, QA, business application, and vendor teams to turn functional and non functional requirements into working systems

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience
2 or more years of hands on experience building, deploying, and supporting production software, backend services, or APIs
Demonstrated experience delivering cloud native solutions on a major public cloud, with meaningful depth in AWS
Experience building services and interfaces that connect multiple systems, including SaaS, cloud, packaged, ERP, and internally developed applications
Experience supporting large scale, business critical production systems, including on call or production support responsibility
Proven ability to independently lead complex technical work across multiple systems and cross functional teams
Strong engineering judgement, with experience leading design and code reviews, setting standards, and mentoring other engineers
Strong troubleshooting and root cause analysis skills across application code, APIs, messaging, databases, and cloud infrastructure
Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain technical decisions, alternatives, risks, and tradeoffs to both engineers and non engineers
Experience in a fast paced Agile environment balancing new delivery, production support, and modernization work at the same time

Required Technical Skills

Cloud Engineering on AWS

Hands on experience building and operating services on AWS, including compute (Lambda, ECS, EKS, or EC2), storage (S3), messaging (SQS, SNS, EventBridge, or Kafka), and managed databases (RDS or DynamoDB)
Experience with AWS identity and security fundamentals: IAM, roles and policies, secrets management, encryption, and network basics such as VPC, security groups, and private connectivity
Experience with scaling, resiliency, failure handling, and cloud cost awareness
Experience with CloudWatch or comparable tooling for logs, metrics, and alerting

APIs and Distributed Services

Strong experience designing, building, and versioning REST APIs, with solid command of JSON, XML, HTTP semantics, and API contracts. Experience with SOAP, gRPC, or GraphQL is useful
Experience with API gateways such as AWS API Gateway, Kong, or Apigee
Strong understanding of synchronous and asynchronous patterns, event driven architecture, microservices, distributed systems, idempotency, retries, and fault tolerance
Experience with API security and authentication patterns, including OAuth 2.0, JWT, mutual TLS, certificates, secrets handling, and service to service authorisation
Experience with data mapping, transformation, validation, routing, orchestration, exception handling, and reconciliation
Experience with message brokers and queues, and with file based data exchange patterns such as SFTP or S3 driven ingestion pipelines
Experience building services designed for reuse by other teams, with clear contracts, documentation, and backward compatibility

Software Engineering

Strong proficiency in at least one backend language: Python, Java, C#, Node.js or TypeScript, or Go
Strong SQL and relational database skills. Exposure to NoSQL where relevant
Git based workflows, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and release management
Infrastructure as code using Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, or comparable tooling
Ability to produce clear technical designs, interface specifications, runbooks, and architecture diagrams

AI Engineering

Hands on experience building software that uses large language models through APIs, including prompt design, structured and schema enforced outputs, streaming, token and cost management, and error handling
Experience with tool calling or function calling patterns, where a model invokes application code under defined constraints
Understanding of retrieval approaches, including embeddings, vector search, and grounding model output in trusted data
Awareness of how to evaluate AI features: test sets, measuring accuracy, regression testing when prompts or models change, and handling non deterministic behavior
Practical understanding of AI guardrails, including input validation, prompt injection risk, output verification, and keeping humans in the loop where decisions carry consequence
Fluent use of AI assisted development tools for code, tests, documentation, and review, with the discipline to review and verify everything generated

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with agent orchestration patterns or frameworks, and with multi step workflows involving planning and tool use
Familiarity with Model Context Protocol or comparable governed approaches to exposing tools and data to models
Experience with Kafka, Solace, or equivalent brokers, and with protocol adapters or translation between legacy and modern interfaces
Experience with change data capture and real time replication, for example AWS DMS or comparable tooling
Experience with schema and contract management for APIs, messages, and events
Experience with distributed tracing, operational dashboards, and platform observability
Experience working in SOX, PCI, or similarly regulated environments
Experience integrating with enterprise platforms such as Oracle E Business Suite, Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, Oracle Integration Cloud, Workday, Coupa, Concur, Quantum Treasury, or comparable systems
Experience supporting Finance, Accounting, Procurement, Treasury, Projects, or Supply Chain business processes
Experience mentoring engineers and supporting teams adopting shared platform services

The base pay range for this role is $89,965.00 to $117,212.00.
The base salary range/hourly rate listed is dependent on job-related, factors such as experience, education, and skills. This position is also eligible for bonus and/or long-term incentive compensation awards.

You may be eligible for the following competitive benefits: medical, dental, vision, life, accident & disability, parental leave, employee assistance program, commuter, paid holidays, paid time off, 401(k) and flight privileges.

United Airlines is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We recruit, employ, train, compensate, and promote without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, or any other protected category under applicable law. We provide reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. To request an accommodation, contact JobAccommodations@united.com

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