Director - Site Reliability Engineering

You Lead the Way. We’ve Got Your Back.

With the right backing, people and businesses have the power to progress in incredible ways. When you join Team Amex, you become part of a global and diverse community of colleagues with an unwavering commitment to back our customers, communities and each other. Here, you’ll learn and grow as we help you create a career journey that’s unique and meaningful to you with benefits, programs, and flexibility that support you personally and professionally.

At American Express, you’ll be recognized for your contributions, leadership, and impact—every colleague has the opportunity to share in the company’s success. Together, we’ll win as a team, striving to uphold our company values and powerful backing promise to provide the world’s best customer experience every day. And we’ll do it with the utmost integrity, and in an environment where everyone is seen, heard and feels like they belong.

Join Team Amex and let's lead the way together.

As part of our diverse tech team, you can architect, code and ship software that makes us an essential part of our customers’ digital lives. Here, you can work alongside talented engineers in an open, supportive, inclusive environment where your voice is valued, and you make your own decisions on what tech to use to solve challenging problems. Amex offers a range of opportunities to work with the latest technologies and encourages you to back the broader engineering community through open source. And because we understand the importance of keeping your skills fresh and relevant, we give you dedicated time to invest in your professional development. Find your place in technology on #TeamAmex.

How will you make an impact in this role?

Most of our software development focuses on delivery new features while optimizing existing systems, building infrastructure and eliminating work through automation. As a leader of the SRE team, you’ll have the opportunity to manage the complex challenges at scale which are unique to American Express, while using your expertise in coding, algorithms, complexity analysis and large-scale system design. SRE's culture of diversity, intellectual curiosity, problem solving and willingness is key to its success. Our organization brings together people with a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We encourage them to collaborate, think big and try new things in a blame-less environment. We promote self-direction to work on meaningful projects, while we also strive to create an environment that provides the support and mentorship needed to learn and grow.

As an Engineering Director, you will operate and lead a global Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization, and partner with the Core Engineering and Platform Teams. You will work with engineering and product partners to ensure alignment between the organizations and contribute to the key strategic efforts. You will model and mentor talent across the pillars to ensure SRE is influential across the substantial product area engineering efforts.

Responsibilities include 

• Define a comprehensive SRE strategy that aligns with the company’s overall goals and objectives, drive technology roadmaps, and implement proactive controls to mitigate risks and enhance system resilience.
• Analyze and solve complex distributed systems that combine internally and externally developed software and production infrastructure. Develop and promote standard methodologies from patterns observed in designs and incidents.
• Implement monitoring controls, provide technical expertise, mentorship, and tooling to ensure the highest level of resiliency, reliability and availability for critical applications and customer journeys.
• Collaborate with product and engineering partners to establish non-functional requirements for new products and services.
• Build and lead a strong team of Site Reliability Engineers, provide guidance, support, and mentorship to ensure the team’s success and development.
• Participate in detailed design reviews and set standards for the organization.
• Develop and maintain Service-Level Objectives and Service-Level Indicators

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience in modeling and architecting complicated business domains and associated methodologies/paradigms: i.e. Domain Driven Design, Event Sourcing, CQRS.
• At least 8 years of proven experience with system design, algorithms, data structures, analysis, and software design.
• Expertise in distributed architectural patterns: event driven microservices, distributed transactions: sagas, append-only logs, change data capture, idempotent consumer, eventual consistency.
• Proven track record implementing minimalistic event driven microservices chassis (not just Spring), i.e. Quarkus/Vert.x, Micronaut, Javalin, Ktor or non-JVM: Javascript, Go.
• Completely hands on and should be able to build and understand code.
• Experience working in a 24/7 environment with on-call responsibilities to provide support to production support on a need basis.
• Deep understanding of cloud technologies, distributed systems, automation, and monitoring tools.
• Demonstrated leadership and management experience in working with multi-functional, geographically dispersed teams on complex projects.
• Understands team dynamics and experienced at building teams that deliver results.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in computer science, Technology, or Engineering.
• Relentless drive to innovate in process and software to better meet the needs of our customers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a broad range of software development and operations technologies such as Cloud Infrastructure, virtualization, load balancing, containers, JVM’s, web servers, application debugging, queueing technologies, caching technologies, databases (RDBMS and NoSQL), routing and switching, etc.
• Experience in high transaction volume OLTP sites or the Financial Services industry.
• Excellent problem-solving, written, interpersonal and communication skills that drive executional impact at scale.
• Combines deep technical expertise, a continuous improvement and automation approach, and systematic and rational root cause analysis to find opportunities to make things faster and better.
• Appetite for trying new things and motivating change in a large and sometimes slow-moving organization.

Salary Range: $170,000.00 to $255,000.00 annually + bonus + equity (if applicable) + benefits

The above represents the expected salary range for this job requisition. Ultimately, in determining your pay, we’ll consider your location, experience, and other job-related factors.

We back our colleagues and their loved ones with benefits and programs that support their holistic well-being. That means we prioritize their physical, financial, and mental health through each stage of life. Benefits include:

• Competitive base salaries 
• Bonus incentives 
• 6% Company Match on retirement savings plan 
• Free financial coaching and financial well-being support 
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits 
• Flexible working model with hybrid, onsite or virtual arrangements depending on role and business need 
• 20+ weeks paid parental leave for all parents, regardless of gender, offered for pregnancy, adoption or surrogacy 
• Free access to global on-site wellness centers staffed with nurses and doctors (depending on location) 
• Free and confidential counseling support through our Healthy Minds program 
• Career development and training opportunities

For a full list of Team Amex benefits, visit our Colleague Benefits Site.

American Express is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status, age, or any other status protected by law.

We back our colleagues with the support they need to thrive, professionally and personally. That's why we have Amex Flex, our enterprise working model that provides greater flexibility to colleagues while ensuring we preserve the important aspects of our unique in-person culture. Depending on role and business needs, colleagues will either work onsite, in a hybrid model (combination of in-office and virtual days) or fully virtually.

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Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the U.S. is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for this position.