AI Principal Technical Coach, 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!

Why you'll love this job

American Airlines is looking for Technical coaches of all levels.  As a Technical coach at American Airlines, you will be guiding product teams and leaders to achieve the company objectives and product vision through the use of engineering principles. American Airlines believes that our purpose is to care for our people on life’s journey, customer or team member. You will be part of a team of coaches making a difference for millions of customers and more than 100,000 team members. This isn’t a typical technical coaching role—you’ll be at the heart of a transformation that’s unique in both scale, depth, and focus on engineering excellence. 

Our goal is to create an enviable, engineering-centric workplace. What does that mean though? Deploying is painless, you have a strong voice, communication flows, we experiment with our products, and we exploit new technology to continuously improve how we work. Of course, we also want to make sure we are having fun, working with, and caring for amazing people.

• The role of the Principal Technical coach is to help teams, products, portfolios, or even an entire organization to the next level of customer delivery that incorporates speed, quality, resiliency, and security
• As a Principal Technical coach, you will leverage your technical and engineering experience getting hands on to solve real world problems, guiding leaders and teams to understand, embrace and evangelize modern engineering practices
• This will be an opportunity to help shape the go forward technical strategies and reinforce current strategies to deliver amazing tech products to our customers
• The Principal Technical coach will also play an integral role in developing technical coaching strategies as well as mentoring other coaches to build a world class coaching organization
• The Principle Technical Coach will be developing/exploring practical use of Agentic AI and AI models and research and evaluate new emergent technologies and architecture patterns

What you'll do

As noted above, this list is intended to reflect the current job but there may be additional essential functions (and certainly non-essential job functions) that are not referenced.  Management will modify the job or require other tasks be performed whenever it is deemed appropriate to do so, observing, of course, any legal obligations including any collective bargaining obligations.

• Evaluate our product/portfolios and assess their architecture/engineering opportunities
• Facilitate Value Stream Mapping sessions to identify opportunities in our development and operational value streams
• Identify opportunities to increase flow, eliminate waste, decouple our applications, and enable service-based ecosystem
• Serve as a go-to expert on modern technology, architecture, engineering, and DevOps practices
• Be a mentor and getting hands on with other technical coaches, software engineers, technical leads, or architects on learning and applying modern architecture, DevOps and engineering practices to solve business problems
• Design and develop facilitator-training materials related to modern engineering practices and technologies
• Define/curate leading indicators and metrics to measure progress toward the desired outcomes 
• This list is intended to reflect the current job, but there may be additional essential functions (and certainly non-essential job functions) that are not referenced
• Coach teams on end-to-end agentic development practices. Facilitate adoption of spec-driven development and TDD for AI systems. Guide agent design patterns (planner–executor, tool invocation, memory management, human oversight). Establish coaching rituals (mob programming, design reviews, retrospectives). Build shared mental models of agent behavior, failure modes, and recovery
• Facilitate team discussions on human-AI interaction patterns (when to trust agents, verification requirements, escalation protocols). Coach product/engineering teams on collaborative AI practices. Build observability so teams understand when AI judgments are reliable. Foster healthy skepticism with transparency and interpretability
• Help teams design guardrails for agentic workflows (input validation, output filtering, anomaly detection). Coach failure mode analysis: prompt injection, hallucinations, drift detection. Teach safe rollout practices (canary deployments, A/B testing, rollback procedures). Establish LLMOps practices (drift detection, monitoring, retraining triggers)
• Identify high-impact opportunities for agentic AI to unlock product value. Facilitate design thinking sessions combining technical feasibility with product vision. Build reusable frameworks for evaluating agentic features. Enable fast learning cycles and cross-team knowledge sharing

All you'll need for success

Minimum Qualifications- Education & Prior Job Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering or related fields or equivalent work experience
• 5+ years of software engineering and/or DevOps experience
• 2 years of experience as a tech lead/architect on a software engineering team
• Hands-on experience with engineering practices such as object-oriented design patterns, Extreme Programming, cloud design patterns, TDD, BDD, refactoring, automation, or continuous integration
• Experience in coaching and mentoring others on various development, build, and deployment practices as well as DevOps principles
• Production experience in Agentic AI with agent design patterns (ReAct, planner–executor, tool use, memory management), LLM prompt engineering at scale, RAG pipelines, multi-step reasoning
• Experience with Vector databases document pipelines, embedding strategies
• Experience with Spec-driven development (OpenSpec/SpecKit) 

Preferred Qualifications- Education & Prior Job Experience

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with 4 years of tech lead/architect
• Experience in designing and implementing automated test suites and end to end Continuous Delivery pipelines 
• Experience with cloud native and microservices architecture
• Experience in modern and classical neural networks including LLMs, CNNs and RNNs

Skills, Licenses & Certifications

• Ability to assess agility needs and make recommendations based on team, product, or portfolio needs
• Ability to identify workflow impediments and work with teams to remove them 
• A growth mindset with enthusiasm for learning and applying new technologies 
• Expert communication skills with teams and technical and business leaders at all levels
• Ability to evangelize new technologies and create proof of concepts

What you'll get

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 benefits to help you stay well. And that’s just the start, we also offer virtual doctor visits, flexible spending accounts and more. 
• Wellness Programs: We want you to be the best version of yourself – that’s why our wellness programs provide you with all the right tools, resources and support you need.
• 401(k) Program: Available upon hire and, depending on the workgroup, employer contributions to your 401(k) program are available after one year.
  • Additional Benefits: Other great benefits include our Employee Assistance Program, pet insurance and discounts on hotels, cars, cruises and more

Feel free to be yourself at American

From the team members we hire to the customers we serve, inclusion and diversity are the foundation of the dynamic workforce at American Airlines. Our 20+ Employee Business Resource Groups are focused on connecting our team members to our customers, suppliers, communities and shareholders, helping team members reach their full potential and creating an inclusive work environment to meet and exceed the needs of our diverse world.

Are you ready to feel a tremendous sense of pride and satisfaction as you do your part to keep the largest airline in the world running smoothly as we care for people on life’s journey? Feel free to be yourself at American.