Lead Software Engineer

Overview

WELCOME TO SITA

At SITA, we keep airports moving, airlines flying smoothly, and borders open. Our technology and communication innovations power the success of the global air travel industry.

You'll find us in 95% of international airports, working closely with over 2,500 transportation and government clients. Each partnership brings unique challenges, and we thrive on delivering fresh solutions and cutting-edge tech to keep operations running like clockwork. We don't just move the world forward-we're proud to be recognized as a Great Place to Work® by 79% of our employees and certified in most of our growing locations. Here, we feel empowered, supported, and inspired to grow.

Are you ready to love your job

The adventure begins right here, with you, at SITA.

The role

Join SITA Lab, where we explore emerging technologies and turn promising ideas into working solutions that could change how air transport operates.

You will work with airports, airlines, SITA teams, technology partners and start-ups to identify difficult industry problems, rapidly explore potential solutions, and build real-world prototypes and pilots.

Modern AI and agentic development tools have fundamentally changed how we engineer software. We expect our engineers to use AI extensively to research, design, build, test and evolve solutions. Your value is not measured by how many lines of code you personally write, but by how effectively you turn ideas into high-quality working systems.

As Lead Engineer, you will provide technical leadership across SITA Lab initiatives and help evolve how the Lab itself engineers software in an AI-native environment.

What You Will Do

Explore

• Investigate emerging technologies and assess how they could solve real problems in aviation.
• Work directly with customers and subject-matter experts to understand operational problems, challenge assumptions and identify opportunities.
• Rapidly evaluate technologies, start-ups, open-source projects, APIs, models and platforms.
• Lead technical discovery, experimentation and design-thinking activities.
• Turn loosely defined ideas into hypotheses that can be tested with working software.
  
  

Engineer

• Design and build prototypes, proofs of concept and pilot solutions, moving from idea to working system quickly.
• Use modern AI-assisted and agentic software-development techniques throughout the engineering lifecycle.
• Decompose complex engineering objectives into tasks that can be effectively executed by people and AI agents.
• Provide agents with the appropriate context, requirements, constraints, architecture and acceptance criteria.
• Build the tests, evaluations and observability needed to verify AI-generated solutions rather than trusting generated output.
• Integrate APIs, enterprise systems, data sources, AI models and existing SITA capabilities into end-to-end solutions.
• Move comfortably between languages, frameworks and platforms rather than being constrained by a single technology stack.
  
  

Lead

• Own technical direction and architecture for Lab initiatives from initial experiment through customer pilot.
• Make pragmatic engineering decisions that balance experimentation speed, quality, security and maintainability.
• Establish effective patterns for collaborative engineering between people and AI agents.
• Review and challenge designs and implementations produced by both engineers and AI agents.
• Mentor engineers in architecture, engineering judgement and effective use of AI development tools.
• Identify when an AI-generated solution is superficially plausible but fundamentally wrong.
• Decide when to prototype rapidly and when a solution requires production-grade engineering controls.
  
  

Deliver responsibly

• Ensure solutions have appropriate automated testing, security controls, observability and documentation.
• Apply secure engineering practices when using AI agents, particularly around credentials, customer data, tool access and external systems.
• Define appropriate operating boundaries and human approval points for autonomous systems.
• Work within SITA architecture, security and AI-governance requirements while maintaining the pace expected from an innovation Lab.
  
  

Influence

• Demonstrate new technologies and solutions to customers and senior stakeholders.
• Explain complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Collaborate across SITA, customers, industry groups, open-source communities and technology partners.
• Help transfer successful Lab experiments into SITA product and operational environments.
  
  

Who You Are

You are an experienced engineer who is excited rather than threatened by the changing nature of software engineering.

• You have excellent software-engineering fundamentals and architectural judgement.
• You are an active and sophisticated user of AI-assisted and agentic development tools.
• You can demonstrate examples where AI materially changed the way you engineered or delivered software.
• You understand that using an AI coding agent effectively requires much more than writing prompts.
• You know how to provide agents with context, constraints and acceptance criteria, and how to validate their output.
• You can quickly understand an unfamiliar repository, technology or domain.
• You are comfortable allowing an agent to implement something you could implement yourself, and equally comfortable taking control when engineering judgement requires it.
• You think in terms of systems, interfaces, events, data flows and failure modes rather than individual code files.
• You naturally experiment, learn and adapt.
• You thrive with ambiguous problems where neither the requirements nor the solution are obvious.
• You prefer building and testing something to spending weeks debating whether it might work.
• You can move comfortably between architecture, coding, customer conversations and technical leadership.
• You can lead and mentor other engineers without becoming the bottleneck.
  
  

Qualifications

Technical experience

Essential

• Significant professional experience designing, building and operating software systems.
• Strong software-engineering fundamentals, including architecture, APIs, distributed systems, testing, security and observability.
• Hands-on capability in at least one mainstream programming ecosystem, with the ability to become productive rapidly in others.
• Practical experience using modern AI coding tools or coding agents as part of real software engineering.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures, containers and Kubernetes.
• Experience designing distributed, event-driven and API-based systems.
• Experience building and consuming REST APIs and modern integration interfaces.
• Experience with relational and NoSQL data stores.
• Strong understanding of Git-based development, CI/CD, automated testing and DevOps practices.
• Experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers.
  
  

Highly desirable

• Java and Spring Boot and/or Python.
• TypeScript or JavaScript and modern web frameworks.
• Azure and/or AWS.
• Kafka or equivalent event-streaming technologies.
• LLM APIs and AI application architectures.
• Agentic systems, tool or function calling, MCP or equivalent tool-integration patterns.
• AI evaluation, tracing and observability.
• Experience taking prototypes through to customer pilots or production.
• Experience in aviation, airports, airlines or the wider travel industry.
  
  

What Success Looks Like

• You convert uncertain customer or industry problems into testable technical hypotheses.
• You use AI agents to increase delivery speed without lowering engineering, security or governance standards.
• You create working demonstrations and pilots that generate evidence, learning and clear next decisions.
• You improve the technical capability of the wider Lab team and reduce dependency on individual experts.
• You help successful experiments progress towards robust product or operational adoption.
  
  

What We Offer

We're all about diversity. We operate in 200 countries and speak 60 different languages and cultures. We're really proud of our inclusive environment. Our offices are comfortable and fun places to work, and we make sure you get to work from home too. Find out what it's like to join our team and take a step closer to your best life ever.

Flex Week: Work from home up to 2 days/week (depending on your team's needs)

Flex Day: Make your workday suit your life and plans.

Flex-Location: Take up to 30 days a year to work from any location in the world.

Employee Wellbeing: We have got you covered with our Employee Assistance Program (EAP), for you and your dependents 24/7, 365 days/year. We also offer Champion Health - a personalized platform that supports a range of wellbeing needs.

Professional Development: At SITA, we believe growth fuels innovation. Our learning ecosystem offers access to world-class platforms and programs designed to help you thrive. From LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft's Enterprise Skills Initiative, and Airport Council International -available to all employees-to specialized solutions like Pluralsight for technology upskilling, Harvard Business Publishing for people leadership, Stanford for strategic development and many others, we align learning opportunities with your Development Plan and our business priorities. Your development journey is supported every step of the way.

Competitive Benefits: Competitive benefits that make sense with both your local market and employment status.

SITA is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value a diverse workforce. In support of our Employment Equity Program, we encourage women, aboriginal people, members of visible minorities, and/or persons with disabilities to apply and self-identify in the application process.

Salary / Compensation Note

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