Associate Data Engineer - Direct College Hire

Department:

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:

Our Technology Direct College Hire Program is a pathway for recent college graduates and individuals who are early in their technology careers to begin their professional growth journey. Through this program, we aim to help you develop lasting relationships while creating a meaningful career through on-the-job mentorship, professional development, and networking opportunities. We welcome emerging Technology professionals to our upcoming January, June, or August 2026 cohorts.   

At Southwest Airlines, our People unite around a shared Purpose: Connecting People to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel. As an Associate Data Engineer on the Network Planning Technology Team, you’ll help build and modernize the systems that shape how we create and share flight schedules, which is the foundation of ticket sales and flight operations. With guidance and support, you’ll contribute to the design and deployment of data engineering solutions, assist in building analytical tools, and help update systems to meet evolving business needs. This is a hands-on opportunity to work with cloud technologies, collaborate with experienced Engineers, and make a meaningful impact on how millions of Customers travel every day.

Additional Details:   

• Please forward any questions regarding this role to TechnologyRecruitingInformation@wnco.com.

• This role is offered as a remote workplace position, which may require travel for training, meetings, conferences, etc. Outside of those required visits, the majority of your working time may be spent in a remote location, away from our Corporate Campus. Please note, while this is a remote position, there is a limited group of states or localities ineligible for Employees to regularly perform their work. Those ineligible locations are: Alaska, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, Washington and Wyoming.

• U.S. citizenship or current authorization to work in the U.S. required and no current or future work authorization sponsorship available.  

• Preferred experience, knowledge, and skills will vary per role and may include, but are not limited to:

• Preferred experience and/or knowledge of Cloud concepts, including AWS, Regions, AZ , VPC, Security Groups, ACLs, CIDR , S3, EC2, Lambda Functions , Fargate, ECS , Parameter Store , API Gateway, CloudFront, CloudWatch , IAM Roles, Route53 , and/or CloudFormation      

• Preferred experience and/or knowledge of On-Prem concepts, including Java,  WebSphere, Gradle, Tomcat, Spring, and/or Oracle 

We’re committed to fair hiring practices and to making employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, military or veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other legally protected characteristics. 

Responsibilities

• Monitor and maintain the components of our data engineering pipeline, and various container-based services configured through UIs, SQL, PL/SQL, Python, and Shell, with code managed in GitHub, deployed through Jenkins
• Work as a part of our production support team to ensure the highest standards of product configuration that meet client requirements
• Test and troubleshoot data pipeline using sample and live client data, utilizing Jenkins, Python, a