Developer - Information Technology at United Airlines, Chicago, IL

Developer - Information Technology at United Airlines in Chicago, IL. Contract. Est. up to $160k. Apply with swipeandhired.

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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, docu