Developer - Information Technology

United Airlines•Chicago, IL

8h•$89,965 - $117,212

About The Position

United Airlines is seeking a Software Engineer to design, build, and support cloud-native services, APIs, and AI-enabled capabilities across its enterprise application portfolio. This hands-on engineering role involves writing production code and owning delivery from requirements and design through deployment, stabilization, and ongoing support. The role builds services and interfaces connecting cloud, SaaS, ERP, and internally developed applications, as well as reusable platform capabilities used by other engineering teams. It also develops AI-enabled features involving large language models, tool calling, and agentic workflows. The position supports Procurement and other enterprise portfolios and contributes to the company’s cloud, API, event-driven, and AI objectives. The engineer works across product, architecture, security, infrastructure, DevOps, QA, business application, and vendor teams. The role also provides technical direction and mentorship, supports production systems, and promotes secure, reliable engineering practices.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
At least 2 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 connecting 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 responsibilities.
Ability to independently lead complex technical work across multiple systems and cross-functional teams.
Strong engineering judgment, including experience leading design and code reviews, setting standards, and mentoring engineers.
Strong troubleshooting and root cause analysis skills across application code, APIs, messaging, databases, and cloud infrastructure.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including explaining technical decisions, alternatives, risks, and tradeoffs to technical and nontechnical audiences.
Experience working in a fast-paced Agile environment while balancing delivery, production support, and modernization work.
Hands-on experience building and operating AWS services, 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, including IAM, roles and policies, secrets management, encryption, VPC, security groups, and private connectivity.
Experience with scaling, resiliency, failure handling, cloud cost awareness, and CloudWatch or comparable logging, metrics, and alerting tools.
Strong experience designing, building, and versioning REST APIs; solid command of JSON, XML, HTTP semantics, and API contracts.
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 authorization.
Experience with data mapping, transformation, validation, routing, orchestration, exception handling, and reconciliation.
Experience with message brokers and queues, and file-based data exchange such as SFTP or S3-driven ingestion pipelines.
Experience building reusable services for other teams, with clear contracts, documentation, and backward compatibility.
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.
Experience with Git-based workflows, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and release management.
Experience with infrastructure as code using Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, or comparable tooling.
Ability to produce technical designs, interface specifications, runbooks, and architecture diagrams.
Hands-on experience building software using large language model APIs, including prompt design, structured and schema-enforced outputs, streaming, token and cost management, and error handling.
Experience with tool or function calling patterns in which 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 AI evaluation methods, including test sets, accuracy measurement, regression testing when prompts or models change, and handling nondeterministic behavior.
Practical understanding of AI guardrails, including input validation, prompt injection risk, output verification, and human involvement when decisions carry consequences.
Fluent use of AI-assisted development tools for code, tests, documentation, and review, with the discipline to review and verify generated output.

Nice To Haves

Experience with agent orchestration patterns or frameworks and 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 protocol adapters or translation between legacy and modern interfaces.
Experience with change data capture and real-time replication, such as 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.
Experience with SOAP, gRPC, or GraphQL.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, test, deploy, and support production services on AWS, including APIs, event-driven components, message flows, background processing, and data interfaces.
Own complex technical initiatives from requirements and solution design through build, testing, deployment, stabilization, and ongoing support.
Build reusable services, components, frameworks, and implementation patterns for application teams.
Guide application teams adopting shared platform services by reviewing designs, resolving dependencies, and upholding security and engineering standards.
Build and extend AI-enabled capabilities, including integrations with large language model APIs, structured outputs, tool and function calling, retrieval, evaluation, and guardrails.
Write clean, secure, well-tested, and well-documented code; lead design and code reviews.
Establish and promote 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 and independently review and validate generated output against 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 to engineers, architects, product partners, and leadership.
Collaborate with product, architecture, security, infrastructure, DevOps, QA, business application, and vendor teams to turn functional and nonfunctional requirements into working systems.