{"id":3712011,"url":"https://alion.io/job/united-airlines-principal-developer-ai","title":"Principal Developer - AI","company":{"id":18409,"name":"United Airlines","domain":"united.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/united","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Schema","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":99,"open_postings":16,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.188,"repost_share":0.063,"time_to_fill_p50_days":8,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Houston, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":140600,"max":183108,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":183108},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":".NET","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"C#","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-03T23:41:38Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-03","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T03:59:33Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"Achieving our goals starts with supporting yours. Grow your career, access top-tier health and wellness benefits, build lasting connections with your team and our customers, and travel the world using our extensive route network.Come join us to create what’s next. Let’s define tomorrow, together.\nDescription\nUnited's Digital Technology team is comprised of many talented individuals all working together with cutting-edge technology to build the best airline in the history of aviation. Our team designs, develops and maintains massively scaling technology solutions brought to life with innovative architectures, data analytics, and digital solutions.\nJob overview and responsibilities\nThe Principal Developer is a hands-on individual contributor responsible for designing, building, testing, deploying, and supporting AI agents and the software capabilities that enable them. The role connects existing United capabilities-including Flight Shopping, Shopping Cart, and Reference Data-to AI-enabled experiences through secure, reusable tools, APIs, and agent services. This position combines substantial direct software development with technical leadership, translating business needs into working solutions and establishing engineering patterns through implementation. The Principal Developer works closely with product, architecture, security, and engineering partners, providing technical direction, code reviews, and mentoring while remaining directly accountable for delivery.\nHands-On Development and Technical Leadership\nPersonally design, write, test, deploy, and support software for AI agents, agent workflows, tool integrations, and supporting services.\n\nBuild reusable tools and APIs that expose existing business capabilities to authorized AI agents and applications.\n\nImplement agent capabilities such as tool selection and execution, context management, workflow state, error recovery, and appropriate human approval.\n\nDevelop production-ready integrations with existing systems, applying authentication, authorization, data protection, input validation, and transaction safeguards.\n\nOwn assigned capabilities through the full development lifecycle, including automated testing, deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and ongoing improvement.\n\nEstablish technical patterns through working implementations; conduct code reviews and mentor developers to improve engineering quality and delivery.\n\nMeasure and optimize reliability, response quality, latency, scalability, and operating cost.\n\nApplied Innovation and Engineering Improvement\nEvaluate emerging AI models, agent frameworks, and integration protocols through focused, hands-on experiments.\n\nBuild proofs of technology to validate feasibility, expose limitations, and inform implementation decisions.\n\nTranslate successful experiments into reusable engineering components and maintainable production solutions.\n\nDevelop evaluation approaches that measure agent behavior, tool execution accuracy, security, and business outcomes.\n\nRecommend technology choices based on demonstrated results, integration needs, maintainability, and cost.\n\nTechnical Collaboration and Delivery Alignment\nWork with product and engineering partners to translate business needs into clear technical requirements, acceptance criteria, and deliverable increments.\n\nCollaborate with architecture, security, platform, and application owners to resolve integration dependencies and implement agreed standards.\n\nParticipate in design discussions, backlog refinement, and sprint planning, bringing implementation experience and practical technical recommendations.\n\nCommunicate progress, technical tradeoffs, risks, and decisions clearly to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.\n\nDocument interfaces, implementation decisions, and operational guidance so other teams can adopt and support delivered capabilities.\n\nQualifications\nWhat’s needed to succeed (Minimum Qualifications):\nBachelor's degree\nComputer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field preferred\nSeven years of software development experience, including substantial hands-on experience building APIs, distributed services, and enterprise integrations, with at least three years performing senior or principal-level development responsibilities. \nDemonstrated hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-based applications or AI agents that invoke tools and integrate with business systems.\nStrong software engineering skills, with proficiency in Python and experience with enterprise development technologies such as C#/.NET.\nPractical experience implementing AI agents, tool/function calling, agent workflows, and integration with enterprise APIs.\nAbility to translate technical designs into tested, deployable, maintainable code and independently troubleshoot complex issues.\nExperience designing and building APIs, microservices, and distributed systems.\nExperience with cloud services, preferably AWS, and automated build, test, and deployment pipelines.\nUnderstanding of AI-specific risks, including prompt injection, unintended tool execution, sensitive data exposure, and unreliable model outputs, with experience implementing appropriate controls.\nExperience with automated testing, agent evaluations, observability, performance tuning, and production support.\nAbility to provide technical direction through implementation, code reviews, and mentoring.\nStrong problem-solving and communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs and collaborate across teams.\nWhat will help you propel from the pack (Preferred Qualifications):\n\nExperience implementing Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers or comparable standards for connecting AI applications to enterprise tools.\n\nExperience with agent orchestration frameworks, model providers, and evaluation tooling.\n\nExperience with OAuth/OIDC, API gateways, rate limiting, idempotency, and secure transaction processing.\n\nExperience with airline shopping, retail, cart, booking, servicing, or comparable transactional systems.\n\nExperience progressing AI experiments into supported production capabilities.\n\nThe base pay range for this role is $140,600.00 to $183,108.00.\nThe 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.\nYou 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.\nUnited Airlines is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We recruit, employ, train, compensate, and promote without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, or any other protected category under applicable law. We provide reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. 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