Engineering Director

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.

About our Team and Product

One Data is a function as a service platform for our internal cloud platform within Amex. 

With One Data, you’ll have the ability to build technology products that shape the way that developers across American Express build micro services. We had an immense growth in terms of the number of onboarded functions in 2023 and except that growth to continue/accelerate.

We build and provide developer support for the product. We follow an everyone on support model.

Our customers are developers, SREs. We do have a production support SRE team but it’s all hands-on deck to support American Express Card Members when the SRE team needs support.

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.

Who you are:

• Are excited about technology, stays up to date with and brings in new technology – understands/participates in CNCF workgroups, developer mailing lists. In short, Be curious !!
• Love dealing with fast pace, changing needs, & limited resources. Action bias.
• Love freedom to execute and not expect every task to be defined ahead of time. 
• Have an Open source first model for building. Contribute, give back. Strive for excellence.
• Understand and are excited 20% projects. You aim for moonshots but can get ground to deliver projects.
• Coach, mentor other developers. You improve the team. You participate in American Express Technology Guilds to network with other developers.
• Are maniacal about Developer Experience.
• Disagree respectfully but commit. Bring people along. Articulate and drive change!
• You are a manager of one.

How will you make an impact in this role?

Software Development

• Perform technical aspects of software development for assigned applications including design, developing prototypes, and coding assignments. 
• Function as a leader on an agile team by contributing to software builds through consistent development practices (tools, common components, and documentation) 
• Lead design/code reviews and automated testing
• Debug software components and identify code defects for remediation.
• Leads the deployment, support, and monitoring of software across test, integration, and production environments.
• Empower teams to automate deployments in test or production environments.
• Empower teams to automatically scale applications based on demand projections. 
• 50% of the time spent on coding and/ or hands-on technical implementation.
• Work with Enterprise Architecture, other Staff Engineers, and Delivery teams to define solution requirements and technical implementation approach.
• Drive both high-level and detailed technical designs and conduct design reviews as needed.
• Take initiative to identify and implement new, highly scalable foundational components and libraries - Improve and maintain existing components of the core platform.
• Actively participate in team and company-wide architecture and engineering discussions and forums 
• Employ technical expertise to help team members overcome technical problems.
• Enforce to release/project schedule and sprint achievements.
• Responsible for health and quality of the applications across the portfolio, including leadership over SCM, functional testing, and CI/CD tool chains.

Leadership 

• Build strong teams with focus on purpose and a develop a safe team space where every team member has a strong sense of belonging and is passionate to achieve collective team objectives.
• Takes accountability for the success of the team.
• Drives the team’s direction and prioritizes initiatives.
• Influence team members by challenging status quo, demonstrating risk taking, and implementing creative ideas.
• Be a productivity multiplier for your team by analyzing your workflow and contributing to enable the team to be more effective, productive, and demonstrating faster and stronger results. 
• Mentor and guide the team to success.
• Accountable for accurate completion and quality of all documentation and work produced by engineering team.
• Accountable for delivering a quality product that meets the customers’ needs.

 Qualifications: 

• 10+ years of software development experience in a professional environment and/or comparable experience such as: - Wide breath of engineering experience.
• A minimum of 8 years of experience with Java, Kotlin or similar Object-Oriented Programming Language in a professional environment required.

• 3+ years required with at least one other modern programming language such as Node.js/JavaScript, Python, GO, Rust.
• Hands-on expertise with application design, software development, and automated testing required.
• Hands-on experience in development of highly scalable, high performance backend applications using a variety of technologies, with specific expertise in Enterprise Java (including advanced design pattern & common libraries) and cloud native technologies required.
• Hands on experience working with Telemetry solutions such as Splunk , Prometheus , Grafana, Thanos etc.
• Experience in building enterprise-grade APIs using state-of-the-art techniques and best practices (GraphQL ,REST, JSON, XML, etc.) required.
• Experience with relational databases, including designing complex schemas and queries required.
• Experience developing within distributed systems or a microservice based architecture required.
• Experience with Cloud Native system design required.
• Familiarity with Container Runtime and Container Orchestration tools such as Docker , cri-o , Kubernetes required.
• Hands on experience working with Build and Code management systems GitHub or GitLab or similar.
• Hands on experience working with CI/CD tool chains Jenkins, Github Actions, Circle CI or similar.
• Familiarity with Data Centric application design, Event Driven Systems, Kafka, Big Data ecosystem , Data pipelines, Stream processing systems etc. is required.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for documenting workflows, tools, or complex areas of a codebase.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment and multi-task efficiently.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills.
• Validated experience leading teams of engineers.
• Experience working with Public Clouds (AWS,GCP,Azure).
• Experience using Infrastructure automation tools chains Ansible, Terraform or similar.
• Experience using database systems like Couchbase, Cassandra, Redis etc. in a high performance and resilient configurations is a plus.
• Hands-on coding experience in One Amex suite of platforms and products, especially One App, One Data, One Stream etc. is a plus.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer science engineering, or related experience required; advanced degree preferred.

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 
• Support for financial-well-being and retirement 
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits (depending on location) 
• Flexible working model with hybrid, onsite or virtual arrangements depending on role and business need 
• Generous paid parental leave policies (depending on your location) 
• 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

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.  

Offer of employment with American Express is conditioned upon the successful completion of a background verification check, subject to applicable laws and regulations.