Product Owner - DevOps Tooling & Pipelines

About Us

At Southwest Airlines, we believe that flying should feel like freedom. For over 50 years, we’ve been connecting people to what matters most with low fares, legendary hospitality, and a heart for service. Our culture is built on the principles of fun, friendliness, and family, making us one of the most admired workplaces in the world. 

If you’re passionate about making a difference, love working in a fast-paced environment, and want to help millions of travelers reach their destinations with a smile, Southwest Airlines is the place for you. Here, your career can truly take flight. 

Job Summary

• Southwest’s DevOps Tooling & Pipelines Pod builds and operates the platforms behind secure software delivery across the enterprise. From Nexus Repository, SonarQube, and Amazon ECR to CI/CD automation and developer self-service, the team improves code quality, release velocity, governance, and the day-to-day experience of engineering teams.

• As Product Owner – DevOps Tooling & Pipelines, you’ll own the backlog and roadmap for critical internal engineering products. You’ll translate platform and customer needs into clear features, user stories, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes while balancing business impact, technical feasibility, risk, and dependencies. Working with platform engineers, cybersecurity, cloud teams, application teams, and leaders, you’ll drive adoption, platform health, operational efficiency, and a reduction in developer friction through data-informed product decisions.

• Serve as the customer proxy and responsible for working with Product Management and other stakeholders—including other product owners and other teams—to define and prioritize the Team Backlog so that the solution effectively addresses program priorities while maintaining technical integrity. Attend product management meetings, planning, and backlog/vision refinement sessions. Part of the Product Team who attends all the events.

• Prepare backlog for PI Planning and decide which work items become part of the team backlog
• Serve as the customer proxy
• Build, refine, prioritize, and maintain the team backlog
• Partner in Scrum ceremonies such as iteration planning, iteration reviews, and demos
• Help create user stories and define acceptance criteria
• Review and accept user stories as complete
• Contribute to vision and program Backlog
• Meet with stakeholders to ensure features and subsequent stories meet expectations
• Drive iteration content by prioritizing user stories
• May perform other job duties as directed by Employee's Leaders

• Ability to make decisions with minimal guidance and oversight
• Ability to be organized with strong attention to detail and capable of coordinating multiple viewpoints into a single message
• Ability to understand technical issues
• Skilled in analytics and problem solving with a high attention to detail
• Ability to anticipate risks, issues and opportunities, and escalate them accordingly
• Skilled in presentation, facilitation, communication, and negotiation
• Ability to be comfortable and articulate in challenging change management scenarios, knowing when to insert self and when to fade back
• Solid knowledge in Agile including the value and principles, and how they are applied in enterprise environments

• Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field and/or equivalent formal training

• Required: Intermediate-level experience, fully functioning broad knowledge in:
  • Agile and Scrum software development methodologies
  • Business analysis, project management or software development delivering enterprise products and solutions
  • 2-5 years of relevant work-related experience
  • SAFe; Agile delivery
  • KPI / analytics measurement; AI-enabled environments
• Preferred:
  • CI/CD concepts
  • Developer platforms
  • AI systems; Jira; Apptio Targetprocess; CSPO / SAFe POPM

• Must meet confidentiality expectations as to confidential, proprietary and sensitive Company information
• Ability to work extended hours as needed