School Principal

The role in plain language

This is a Principal Technical Coach role at American Airlines, based in Fort Worth, TX. But here's the thing: you're not getting a flight benefits catalog with a side of HR speak. You're getting a real shot at shaping how thousands of engineers build software for one of the biggest airlines in the world.

American Airlines is looking for someone who has been hands on, knows modern engineering inside and out, and can coach teams and leaders to build better products ; faster, safer, and smarter. You won't just talk about best practices. You'll get into the code, the architecture, and the hard conversations.

They're in the middle of a massive transformation. The goal is to build an engineering culture where deploying is painless, your voice matters, and experimentation is the norm. You'll be a key part of that.

What you'll actually do

• Evaluate product portfolios and assess their architecture and engineering opportunities
• Facilitate Value Stream Mapping sessions to find bottlenecks in development and operations
• Identify ways to increase flow, eliminate waste, decouple applications, and move toward a service based ecosystem
• Serve as the go to expert on modern technology, architecture, engineering, and DevOps practices
• Mentor other technical coaches, software engineers, technical leads, and architects ; hands on ; on applying modern engineering practices to real business problems
• Design and develop facilitator training materials focused on modern engineering practices and technologies
• Define and curate leading indicators and metrics to measure progress toward desired outcomes
• Coach teams on end to end agentic development practices
• Facilitate adoption of spec driven development and test driven development for AI systems
• Guide agent design patterns ; planner executor, tool invocation, memory management, human oversight
• Establish coaching rituals like mob programming, design reviews, and retrospectives
• Build shared mental models of agent behavior, failure modes, and recovery
• Facilitate team discussions on human AI interaction patterns: when to trust agents, what verification is needed, how escalation works
• Coach product and engineering teams on collaborative AI practices
• Build observability so teams understand when AI judgments are reliable, and foster healthy skepticism through 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

What you need to bring

This is a senior role. You're expected to have deep technical and engineering experience ; the kind you can't fake. You need to be comfortable getting hands on to solve real problems, and you need to be able to guide leaders and teams to understand, embrace, and evangelize modern engineering practices.

You'll also play a big part in developing technical coaching strategies and mentoring other coaches. This isn't just about your own work; it's about building a world class coaching organization.

And you'll be working with emerging tech ; specifically Agentic AI, AI models, and new architecture patterns. If that excites you, good. If it intimidates you, this probably isn't the right fit.

Disclaimer stuff

The list of responsibilities above reflects the current job as it's understood now. Management may modify the job or require other tasks to be performed whenever it's appropriate ; obviously within legal and collective bargaining obligations. So flexibility matters.

How to apply

If this sounds like the kind of work you already do, or the kind you're ready to step into, send your resume through JobXi. Use the Fort Worth, TX posting. Make it clear why your experience lines up with what's described here.