Principal Engineer, IT Systems Engineering

Are you ready to explore a world of possibilities, both at work and during your time off? Join our American Airlines family, and you’ll travel the world, grow your expertise and become the best version of you.  As you embark on a new journey, you’ll tackle challenges with flexibility and grace, learning new skills and advancing your career while having the time of your life.  Feel free to enrich both your personal and work life and hop on board!

• This job is a member of the Information Technology Team within the Information Technology Division.
• Responsible for supporting a wide range of infrastructure services, including, but not limited to, Cloud Technologies, Virtual platforms, and Automation & Orchestration. This position is responsible for providing end to end technical leadership. It is responsible for sustaining a technical roadmap that aligns with the business vision for supported domains, creating or evaluating solution and integration architectures for technical viability and alignment with product requirements, and determining problem scoping and sizing on new projects.

As noted above, this list is intended to reflect the current job but there may be additional essential functions (and certainly non-essential job functions) that are not referenced.  Management will modify the job or require other tasks be performed whenever it is deemed appropriate to do so, observing, of course, any legal obligations including any collective bargaining obligations.

• Building, testing, and maintaining custom Kubernetes operators that power American's multi-tenant runtime platform
• Working across squads and teams to identify, prioritize, and architect solutions
• Leading a team of software engineers in following best practices to develop highly resilient, efficient, maintainable software
• Utilizing your deep understanding of Kubernetes to support the team in the engineering of a highly resilient, secure, and effective platform
• Supporting engineers across American in utilizing the platform to build products powering all parts of the airline.
• Communicates a clear technical roadmap on the optimal application of technology to products and services to various stakeholders, including executives, business sponsors, delivery teams and managers, and other technical staff
• Leverages work across the business domains in order to align efforts and create synergies
• Delivers architectural solutions that incorporate industry and company technology standards
• Provides technical engineering leadership for supporting Cybersecurity across distributed environments
• Significant experience in requirements analysis and use case development, with a thorough understanding of software development life cycles, development and technology tools, testing methodologies, and requirements gathering
• Establishes recommendations and guidelines for the development, test, operations and application support environments
• Assesses the risk of production deployment of a business critical applications, including installation and configuration readiness, performance and scalability evaluation, stability and durability evaluation, and best practices procedures
• Assesses the processes that will be used to operate, support and maintain Enterprise implementation(s); refines the deployment process so that it will easily scale to fit into an enterprise scope
• Actively participates in requirements analysis, proofs of concepts, RFI & RFP processes, and solution delivery
• Anticipates and acts upon issues that arise, provides alternative approaches, optimal solution, and continuously improving performance of applications
• Develops prototypes and concepts for new technologies and ideas with little or no guidance
• Evaluates and creates new tools and techniques to facilitate effective development practices
  Mentors the development team and promotes ideas for useful new projects and technologies
• Examines emerging technologies/technology practices and incorporates into architectural solution, when appropriate
• Assists in determining Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for immediate needs/deployment and enterprise SLAs to support ongoing operations, if any

Minimum Qualifications- Education & Prior Job Experience

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Technology , Information Systems (CIS/MIS), Engineering or related technical discipline, or equivalent experience/training
• 8 years experience as a software or platform engineer
• 5 years of experience with public and private cloud technologies, particularly Kubernetes 

Preferred Qualifications- Education & Prior Job Experience

• Master's in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Technology , Information Systems (CIS/MIS), Engineering or related technical discipline, or equivalent experience/training
• 3 years of technical or team leadership experience
• Airline industry experience

Skills, Licenses & Certifications

• Hands-on experience in systems development in a variety of computing architectures and environments
• Hands-on experience writing, testing, and maintaining Kubernetes operator code in Go
• Strong technical expertise in Kubernetes architecture, including networking patterns, security patterns, service mesh, scheduling, and lifecycle automation.
• Experience with Kubebuilder and/or Operator SDK
• A test-first mindset and experience using Ginkgo/Gomega
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes networking internals and cloud networking concepts.
• Experience maintaining and operating large-scale, highly resilient platforms in the public cloud.
• Proficient in infrastructure automation & orchestration
• Proficient in Agile methodologies
• Significant experience in requirements analysis and use case development, with a thorough understanding of software development life cycles, development and technology tools, testing methodologies, and requirements gathering
• Ability to create/reengineer integration solutions (architectures) with other enterprise standard technologies
• Ability to manage multiple efforts concurrently with the skills to keep complex initiatives moving forward quickly while exercising an appropriate level of procedural discipline
• Proven ability to build strong and sustainable relationships with internal and external stakeholders
• Ability to adapt to unexpected events, new facts, and rapidly changing circumstances
• Ability to thrive in a sense-of-urgency environment and leverage best practices

Feel free to take advantage of all that American Airlines has to offer: 

• Travel Perks: Ready to explore the world? You, your family and your friends can reach 365 destinations on more than 6,800 daily flights across our global network.
• Health Benefits: On day one, you’ll have access to your health, dental, prescription and vision benefits to help you stay well. And that’s just the start, we also offer virtual doctor visits, flexible spending accounts and more. 
• Wellness Programs: We want you to be the best version of yourself – that’s why our wellness programs provide you with all the right tools, resources and support you need.
• 401(k) Program: Available upon hire and, depending on the workgroup, employer contributions to your 401(k) program are available after one year.
• Additional Benefits: Other great benefits include our Employee Assistance Program, pet insurance and discounts on hotels, cars, cruises and more

From the team members we hire to the customers we serve, inclusion and diversity are the foundation of the dynamic workforce at American Airlines. Our 20+ Employee Business Resource Groups are focused on connecting our team members to our customers, suppliers, communities and shareholders, helping team members reach their full potential and creating an inclusive work environment to meet and exceed the needs of our diverse world.

Are you ready to feel a tremendous sense of pride and satisfaction as you do your part to keep the largest airline in the world running smoothly as we care for people on life’s journey? Feel free to be yourself at American.