Post by Nikhil Singh

Today, I was part of the Southwest Airlines layoffs, where the company made the difficult decision to reduce its corporate workforce by 15% to cut costs. While this is undoubtedly a challenging moment, I want to take a step back to express my deep gratitude for the incredible experience I’ve had at Southwest. Joining Southwest in July 2023 as my first full-time job after college was a privilege. I had the opportunity to work with some of the kindest, most talented teammates who made every day rewarding. To my Southwest family: thank you for your support, mentorship, and friendship. I’m so grateful for the time we shared and the impact we made together. During my time at Southwest, I worked with a team responsible for implementing and maintaining graph database architecture that received, processed, and fed data into optimizers for flight and crew rerouting—critical for mitigating disruptions caused by events like winter storms. This work was part of Southwest’s efforts to improve operational resilience following the 2022 winter meltdown. I also led DevOps initiatives, including migrating repositories to a new Jenkins instance under tight technical constraints, which enhanced system reliability and streamlined CI/CD processes. Beyond my time at Southwest, I’ve gained frontend development experience through internships, where I built responsive, user-friendly interfaces using ReactJS and CSS. I’m now actively seeking new opportunities where I can contribute my skills and passion for problem-solving. If you know of any roles that align with my experience—or just want to connect—I’d love to hear from you! Thank you