Principal Programmer​/Technical Lead, IT

Intro

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 providing technical leadership for assigned IT development personnel and be responsible for the technical design and implementation of mid-range software development of the assigned web services and/or applications.

• Key aspects which will differentiate this role are: possessing working knowledge of latest industry best practices and trends within data frameworks and management (e.g. SQL/non-SQL, In-memory Cache, SSD); cloud frameworks, content delivery network design, web services design, rules engine design, and software optimization techniques.

• Works with product management, business analysts, developers, testers and architectural teams to define strategy and requirements

• Develops and drives high-level strategic initiatives and secures commitment from external and internal teams for new initiatives

• Drives consensus on technical approach, sets timelines, and leads cross-functional application teams from design through delivery

• Applies software engineering best industry practices to web applications and services

• Provides technical guidance, direction, and decisions to team developing custom and off-the-shelf web applications and services

• Works with Application/Enterprise Architects to establish development and deployment standards, and ensures adherence to technology platform decisions

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Technology, Information Systems (CIS/MIS), Engineering or related technical discipline, or equivalent experience/training

• 8 years of Java Development Environment (JDE) experience

• 2 years Application Programming Interface (ADI) framework / REST development

• 2 years in web services (mid-range) development

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Technology, Information Systems (CIS/MIS), Engineering or related technical discipline, or equivalent experience/training

• 3 years technical leadership of IT personnel

• Airline experience

• Extensive experience designing and building distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures

• Expertise in API design (Graph
  
  QL and REST) and service optimization for performance

• Hands‑on experience with in‑memory computing, caching techniques, and event streaming using Apache Kafka

• Knowledge of stream processing frameworks such as Apache Flink

• Proven experience deploying and operating applications on Azure and/or AWS, leveraging cloud‑native patterns and Infrastructure as Code

• Strong understanding of Kubernetes (K8s) for container orchestration and scalable deployments

• Solid background in Dev Ops practices, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and advanced deployment strategies (blue‑green, canary)

• Ability to implement monitoring, logging, tracing, and environment‑level observability for production systems

• Demonstrated expertise in security practices, including vulnerability remediation, secure coding, dependency scanning, and secrets management

• Track record of leading large‑scale projects, breaking down complex initiatives, and delivering successfully with a strong foundation in modern data management technologies

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…