Full Stack Engineer

United Airlines; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

Life & disability insurance

Parental leave

Flight privileges

401(k)

Job summary

United Airlines is seeking a Senior Full Stack Developer to design, build, and support modern capabilities for Crew Pay, a critical pay platform. The role blends hands-on development with cloud-native engineering on AWS, event-driven architectures, streaming, and relational databases.

You will deliver secure, observable, and maintainable solutions while partnering with product owners, engineers, architects, quality engineers, DevOps, and business stakeholders to drive value and reliability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in CS/Engineering/IS or related field.
• 4+ years of professional software development experience.
• Strong backend development with Java or Python.
• Experience with RESTful APIs, microservices and distributed systems.
• Hands-on with AWS ECS/Fargate, Lambda, SQS and SNS.
• Experience with Kafka or streaming platforms.
• Experience with Spark jobs and SQL performance tuning.
• Infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, version control, automated testing, secure development.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and support pay-processing features for Crew Pay.
• Own production applications from design through production support.
• Deliver reliable features with observability and security in mind.
• Collaborate with product owners, engineers, architects, and QA across teams.

Skills

Java

Python

REST APIs

Microservices

Distributed systems

Asynchronous processing

AWS

Kafka

Spark

SQL

CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS ECS/Fargate

Lambda

SQS

SNS

S3

RDS

Kafka

Spark

EMR

Job description

The Senior Full Stack Developer will design, build, and support modern capabilities for Crew Pay, a business-critical pay platform. This role combines hands-on application development with cloud-native engineering across AWS, event-driven services, streaming, data processing, and relational databases. The successful candidate will deliver secure, resilient, observable, and maintainable solutions while partnering with product owners, engineers, architects, quality engineering, DevOps, and business stakeholders.

Technical environment

• Cloud and compute: AWS ECS/Fargate and Lambda
• Messaging and events: Kafka, SQS, and SNS
• Data and storage: S3, RDS, Aurora, and SQL
• Data processing: Apache Spark and EMR
• Application development: Microservices, APIs, and modern web user interfaces
• Engineering: CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, and observability
• AI-enabled delivery: AI coding assistants, agents, and agentic workflows

Success in this role

• Delivers reliable features that improve pay-processing accuracy, transparency, and operational efficiency
• Reduces production risk through strong engineering controls, automated validation, and actionable observability
• Improves delivery speed and code quality through reusable patterns, automation, and responsible use of AI-assisted engineering
• Takes ownership from design through production support and continuously improves the product and engineering system

Qualifications

What’s needed to succeed (Minimum Qualifications):

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 4+ years of professional software development experience, including ownership of production applications
• Strong back-end development experience using Java, Python, or a comparable enterprise language and framework
• Hands-on experience with RESTful APIs, microservices, distributed systems, and asynchronous processing
• Practical experience with AWS ECS/Fargate, Lambda, SQS, SNS, S3, and RDS
• Experience developing event-driven solutions using Kafka or a comparable streaming platform
• Experience building, troubleshooting, and optimizing Apache Spark jobs
• Strong knowledge of SQL, relational data modeling, transactions, and performance tuning
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, source control, automated testing, and secure software development practices
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose complex production issues across applications, messaging, data, and cloud infrastructure layers
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering and business teams

What will help you propel from the pack (Preferred Qualifications):

• Experience supporting payroll, crew pay, financial, or other high-accuracy transaction-processing systems
• Experience with Amazon MSK, EMR or EMR Serverless, Aurora MySQL, container orchestration, and serverless architectures
• Knowledge of event schemas, data lineage, reconciliation, replay controls, and audit-trail design
• Experience applying observability, performance engineering, cost optimization, and operational automation in AWS
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools for requirements refinement, code generation, test creation, debugging, refactoring, documentation, or code review
• Experience creating AI agents or agentic workflows using tools or frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, Model Context Protocols, retrieval-augmented generation, or similar patterns
• Understanding of responsible AI practices, prompt and tool security, human-in-the-loop controls, evaluation, and production monitoring for AI-enabled solutions
• Experience working in a product-centric Agile environment with outcome-based delivery and shared operational ownership

The base salary range/hourly rate listed is dependent on job-related, factors such as experience, education, and skills. This position is also eligible for bonus and/or long-term incentive compensation awards.

You may be eligible for the following competitive benefits: medical, dental, vision, life, accident & disability, parental leave, employee assistance program, commuter, paid holidays, paid time off, 401(k) and flight privileges.