U

United Airlines

Flies passengers and cargo worldwide from US hubs

Software Engineer

Full-TimePosted on 10/24/2026
$90k - $117.2k+ Bonus + Long-term incentive compensation awards
Mid
Bachelor's
Chicago, IL, USA
In Person
Software EngineeringAI Application Engineering, Backend Engineering

About the job

Requirements
  • A 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 responsibility.
  • Ability to independently lead complex technical work across multiple systems and cross-functional teams.
  • Engineering judgment and experience leading design and code reviews, setting standards, and mentoring other engineers.
  • Troubleshooting and root-cause analysis skills across application code, APIs, messaging, databases, and cloud infrastructure.
  • Written and verbal communication skills to explain technical decisions, alternatives, risks, and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Experience in a fast-paced Agile environment balancing new delivery, production support, and modernization work.
  • Hands-on experience building and operating AWS services, including compute such as Lambda, ECS, EKS, or EC2; storage such as S3; messaging such as SQS, SNS, EventBridge, or Kafka; and managed databases such as RDS or DynamoDB.
  • Experience with AWS identity and security fundamentals, including 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.
  • Experience designing, building, and versioning REST APIs, with command of JSON, XML, HTTP semantics, and API contracts.
  • Experience with API gateways such as AWS API Gateway, Kong, or Apigee.
  • 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 patterns such as SFTP or S3-driven ingestion pipelines.
  • Experience building reusable services with clear contracts, documentation, and backward compatibility for other teams.
  • Proficiency in at least one backend language: Python, Java, C#, Node.js or TypeScript, or Go.
  • Strong SQL and relational database skills, with 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-calling 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 feature evaluation, including test sets, accuracy measurement, 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 when decisions have consequences.
  • Fluent use of AI-assisted development tools for code, tests, documentation, and review, with the discipline to review and verify generated output.
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, from requirements and solution design through build, test, deployment, stabilization, and ongoing support.
  • Build reusable services, components, frameworks, and implementation patterns for other application teams to reduce point-to-point interfaces and improve delivery consistency.
  • Provide technical guidance to application teams adopting shared platform services, review their designs, resolve dependencies, and uphold security and engineering standards.
  • Build and extend AI-enabled capabilities, including integrations with large language model APIs, structured output handling, tool and function calling, retrieval, evaluation, and guardrails.
  • Write clean, secure, well-tested, and well-documented code; lead design and code reviews and maintain 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 to accelerate delivery while independently reviewing and validating their 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, and communicate design decisions and tradeoffs to engineers, architects, product partners, and leadership.
  • Work with product, architecture, security, infrastructure, DevOps, QA, business application, and vendor teams to turn functional and non-functional requirements into working systems.
Desired Qualifications
  • 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 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.

About the company

United Airlines flies passengers and cargo across the United States and to destinations around the world, running a hub network that spans Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Newark, San Francisco, Washington Dulles and Guam. It was a founding member of Star Alliance, the global airline partnership that links its routes and frequent-flyer benefits with carriers such as Lufthansa and Air Canada. Travelers book seats in economy, premium and Polaris business cabins, and United earns money from fares, bag and seat fees, cargo, and its MileagePlus loyalty program, which sells miles to card partners. United traces its roots to Varney Air Lines, which began flying airmail in 1926, and is based in Chicago.

Company Size

10,001+

Company Stage

IPO

Headquarters

Chicago, Illinois

Founded

1926

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Premium travel fuels growth: premium revenue rose 16% in Q2 2026 as total revenue reached $17.7 billion.
  • Hiring keeps expanding: United had 117,500 employees by June 2026, up 5.6% from a year earlier.
  • Cabin crew pay is climbing: the flight attendant deal reached in March 2026 lifts base pay 31% on average.

What critics are saying

  • Fuel prices squeeze profits: in July 2026, United expected nearly $6 billion more fuel expense for the year.
  • Mechanics' labor fight drags on: United technicians rejected a Teamsters tentative deal 53.5% to 46.5% in September 2026.
  • Newark growth was capped: the FAA limited the airport to 72 hourly flights from January through October 2026.

What makes United Airlines unique

  • United gives loyalty members free fast WiFi: it targets Starlink on nearly 1,000 aircraft by end of 2026.
  • Its Pacific reach extends past Hawaii: United runs a hub on Guam, a US island territory near Asia.
  • United dominates New York's Newark airport: it runs about 70% of the flights there.

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Benefits

  • Health Insurance
  • Dental Insurance
  • Vision Insurance
  • Life Insurance
  • Parental Leave
  • Employee Assistance Program
  • Commuter
  • Paid Holidays
  • Paid Time Off

Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

11%

1 year growth

11%

2 year growth

11%
Yahoo Finance
Oct 24th, 2026
American Airlines warns fares will stay high even if fuel falls, as fuel adds $1.9B to costs

American Airlines expects airfares to stay high even if fuel prices fall, finance chief Devon May told the Financial Times. Jet fuel prices have more than doubled since the Iran war began in late February. "If fuel comes down, I think airfares probably stay largely where they're at right now," May said. Higher fuel costs added $1.9 billion to American's costs in the third quarter, and the airline warned it could lose $1 to $1.60 per share this year. The average base fare rose from $405 in late 2025 to $436 in the second quarter, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. May said fares had not fully recovered in real terms since the pandemic. Delta raised fares by about 20% without a noticeable drop in sales. United recouped 72% of a $1.8 billion fuel hit through higher prices.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 21st, 2026
United bets on Starlink to win brand-loyal flyers as Q3 revenue rises 17% to $17.9B

United Airlines is betting that Starlink, SpaceX's in-flight satellite internet service, will win over customers loyal to other airlines. Chief executive officer Scott Kirby said on the company's third-quarter 2026 earnings call that the carrier sees evidence the service influences which airline people choose. United offers more Starlink flights than the entire US airline industry combined, Kirby said. It has launched a tracker so customers can check whether their flight has the service. Kirby said some customers loyal to rival airlines switched solely because of Starlink, and stayed after trying United. He expects higher revenue per available seat mile in 2027 and beyond. Third-quarter total operating revenue rose 17% year over year to $17.9 billion. Loyalty and premium revenue each grew 17%, while basic economy revenue rose 16%.

PR Newswire
Sep 24th, 2026
United Airlines receives first GTF Advantage-powered A321XLR from RTX's Pratt & Whitney

United Airlines has received its first Airbus A321XLR aircraft powered by Pratt & Whitney's GTF Advantage engines, marking the inaugural delivery of this enhanced engine variant. The GTF Advantage offers up to twice the operational lifespan of current GTF engines and provides 4-8% more takeoff thrust, enabling extended range capabilities. The engine features an advanced hot section design and remains fully compatible with existing GTF models, simplifying fleet operations. Pratt & Whitney, an RTX business, plans to transition its entire PW1100G-JM production line to the Advantage specification by 2028. Current GTF operators will be able to access 90-95% of the Advantage's durability improvements through a Hot Section Plus upgrade option, available from early next year during scheduled maintenance visits.

Yahoo Finance
Sep 17th, 2026
DISH and United Airlines bring live football to 35,000 feet via Starlink screens

DISH and United Airlines have partnered to bring live football to passengers on Starlink-enabled flights. The service launches this week on over 200 United aircraft, expanding to nearly 700 planes by February 2027. Passengers will have access to nine live sports channels including ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, ESPN2, FS1, NFL Network, and Prime Video's Thursday Night Football. The service covers both college and professional football games throughout the 2026–2027 season. The partnership uses DISH's OnStream platform, which delivers entertainment across multiple business sectors including hospitality, senior living, and aviation. The collaboration aims to keep sports fans connected to live games whilst travelling at 35,000 feet.

Yahoo Finance
Aug 27th, 2026
United trades at forward P/E of 11 as US airfares jump 25.5% and CEO predicts more rises

US airline fares rose 25.5% year over year in July, and United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby expects further gradual increases through the first half of 2027 if demand holds. United's second-quarter revenue reached $17.67 billion, up 16% year over year. Despite industry-wide fare growth, United shares have gained only 2.69% year to date, compared with Delta's 20.64% rise. United trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 11, versus Delta's 13. Kirby framed the fare increases as structural catch-up, noting airport fees have risen roughly 60% since COVID and maintenance costs remain elevated. He told investors that airfares are still 13% below 2019 levels in real terms.