Principal Developer - AI
United Airlines1 day ago
Houston, TX, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$141k - $183k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, write, test, deploy, and support software for AI agents, agent workflows, tool integrations, and supporting services.
- Build reusable tools and APIs that expose existing United business capabilities to authorized AI agents and applications.
- Implement tool selection and execution, context management, workflow state, error recovery, and human-approval capabilities.
- Develop secure production integrations using authentication, authorization, data protection, input validation, and transaction safeguards.
- Own assigned capabilities through development, testing, deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement.
- Establish engineering patterns through implementation, conduct code reviews, mentor developers, and provide technical direction.
- Evaluate AI models, agent frameworks, integration protocols, and emerging technologies through hands-on experiments and proofs of technology.
- Develop evaluations for agent behavior, tool-execution accuracy, security, and business outcomes.
- Collaborate with product, architecture, security, platform, and application teams to define requirements, resolve dependencies, and deliver solutions.
- Document interfaces, implementation decisions, and operational guidance for adopting and supporting delivered capabilities.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field is required or preferred as stated.
- Seven years of software development experience, including at least three years in senior- or principal-level development responsibilities.
- Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-based applications or AI agents that invoke tools and integrate with business systems.
- Strong software engineering skills with proficiency in Python and experience with C#/.NET or comparable enterprise development technologies.
- Experience with AI agents, tool or function calling, agent workflows, enterprise APIs, APIs, microservices, and distributed systems.
- Experience with cloud services, preferably AWS, and automated build, test, and deployment pipelines.
- Understanding of AI risks such as prompt injection, unintended tool execution, sensitive-data exposure, and unreliable model outputs, with experience implementing controls.
- Experience with automated testing, agent evaluations, observability, performance tuning, and production support.
- Ability to provide technical direction through implementation, code reviews, mentoring, troubleshooting, and cross-team communication.
- Preferred experience includes MCP servers, agent orchestration frameworks, model providers, evaluation tooling, OAuth/OIDC, API gateways, rate limiting, idempotency, secure transaction processing, transactional systems, and moving AI experiments into production.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, life, accident and disability coverage, parental leave, employee assistance program, commuter benefits, paid holidays, paid time off, 401(k), and flight privileges.
- The position is eligible for bonus and/or long-term incentive compensation awards.
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About United Airlines
United Airlines is a major U.S. carrier that provides passenger air travel and air cargo services across a global network spanning six continents. The company sells tickets and ancillary services through united.com and its mobile apps, operates the MileagePlus loyalty program with co-brand credit card partnerships, and supports operations with large-scale digital systems. Headquartered in Chicago, it is part of publicly traded United Airlines Holdings (NASDAQ: UAL) and a member of Star Alliance.