Tech Lead AI Engineer

Department Technology

Our 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 Tech Lead AI Engineer Global supporting Southwest’s Agentic AI initiatives, you’ll drive the design, delivery, and operation of production‑ready AI systems built to scale across the enterprise. This role blends hands‑on engineering with technical leadership—guiding Teams in building secure, reliable, and observable AI‑powered services using modern backend frameworks, distributed systems, and AWS‑native cloud technologies. You’ll set technical direction, influence architecture and standards, and partner closely with Product, Platform, Data, and Security Teams to ensure AI solutions meet enterprise requirements. This role offers the opportunity to work on high‑impact AI platforms while reinforcing strong engineering practices across cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and operational excellence. As we continue to grow our Global Innovation Center (GIC) in Hyderabad, we’re hiring multiple Tech Lead AI Engineers across a variety of Pods and initiatives—each offering the opportunity to lead meaningful work, navigate complexity, and help advance the technology that powers Southwest’s operation. Read on to learn more about the Pods you could support.

• Agentic AI - Customer & Commercial Pod In the Agentic AI – Customer & Commercial Pod, you’ll lead the development of intelligent, Customer‑facing AI agents that simplify how Customers get help, explore options, and complete transactions. This role operates at the intersection of advanced agentic AI and robust software engineering—translating use cases into scalable, reusable agent capabilities that Teams across Southwest can trust and extend. You’ll set technical direction for agentic systems, lead architecture and design reviews, and guide teams building task‑oriented agents with planning, tool orchestration, fallbacks, and safety controls. With strong ownership of evaluation strategies, observability, and reliability practices, you’ll ensure non‑deterministic systems are safe, performant, and production‑ready. Leveraging AWS‑first implementations, including Bedrock agents and secure cloud patterns, you’ll help shape AI experiences that evolve over time while maintaining enterprise‑grade standards and Customer trust.

Responsibilities

• Lead and motivate team in building and operating task-oriented agents (planner/executor, tool routing, HITL checkpoints, fallbacks, circuit breakers) with clear interfaces and SLOs.
• Provide technical direction for design and productionization of retrieval/grounding pipelines (RAG, structured APIs, metadata/knowledge graphs), including chunking, summarization, embeddings lifecycle, and relevance tuning.
• Create, maintain, and review prompt engineering strategies including modular system/instruction prompts and tool specs; guide versioned prompt libraries, A/B variants, and promotion criteria.
• Plan and oversee evaluation frameworks including per-use-case eval suites (functional, behavioral, safety, latency, cost); guide automation of offline/online evals and eval gates into CI/CD pipelines.
• Provide oversight for security and compliance strategies including PII redaction, policy-as-code checks, guardrails, and compliant audit trails across agents and context pipelines.
• Identify and resolve optimization challenges for strategies for context size, caching, rerankers, model selection, and tool routing to reduce cost per successful task.
• Act as technical interface for data engineering architecture including schemas/data contracts, batch/stream ETL for context stores, embedding jobs, and freshness SLAs (with Data Platform).
• Investigate and approve integration strategies with runtime frameworks (e.g., LangGraph/AgentCore, Bedrock Agents/Guardrails) and enterprise systems.
• Evaluate and ensure documentation standards including agent cards, runbooks, and playbooks; guide development of templates and internal libraries for repeatable delivery within the Southwest Airlines AI community.
• Mentor AI engineers through coaching and training…