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.

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.  American Express 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.

The Chief Technology Officer Organization’s vision is to raise the bar for technical excellence, talent, strategy, and standards across Technology. It also seeks to cultivate and foster technical innovation, as well as elevate and amplify the technical heartbeat of the organization.

How will you make an impact in this role?

We are building foundational technology for a globally distributed software as a service offering that we can bring to new markets quickly with superior economics. Our goal is to be able to rapidly stand up a new instance of application in multiple clouds so that the company can move quickly to seize business opportunities and outpace the competition.

We’re looking for an Engineering Director to lead the internal platform development, Internal Infrastructure Platform. The platform is a developer-first solution designed to streamline the management and deployment of public cloud infrastructure (AWS and GCP) using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles. Unlike traditional platforms that abstract infrastructure details, this platform prioritizes transparency and control, enabling developers to interact directly with IaC configurations while providing guardrails to maintain consistency, security, and compliance.

Your work on the platform with reduce time to market and will supercharge the growth of our business for the next decade in a complex and evolving global environment. It’s a chance to have a huge impact on how we provide the world’s best customer experience every day to more people in more places than ever before!

This role reports to the Vice President of Engineering.

Role & Responsibility:

• Rapidly learn the … technology landscape
• Provide hands-on engineering leadership to design and deliver transformational state-of-the-art and highly scalable …platform, client interfaces and analysis tools
• Champion and drive cross-organizational efforts to increase product adoption.
• Adopt and drive modern development practices and drive engineering excellence, encourage healthy and decisive design discussions, code reviews
• Own all aspects of the product: engineering, quality of release, system performance, platform availability, operational efficiency, risk management, information security and data management.
• Care deeply about developer experience
• Serve as a passionate and expert Advocate of our frameworks and platform
• Cultivate an environment of innovation and continuous improvement, leading changes that drive efficiencies into existing engineering and delivery processes.
• 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 
• Act as forward-thinking leader and remain current on modern technology-leading trends. Understand / participate in CNCF workgroups.
• Recruit, hire, and scale a strong engineering team, forging a culture that fosters a sense of belonging in its members and empowers them to make their own decisions about how they work
• Be a bridge between the team and the wider Amex world, synthesizing company and department priorities to provide the business context for their work, unblocking them, and facilitating cross-team collaboration
• Help the team make smart and forward-looking engineering decisions, weighing tradeoffs and avoiding counterproductive local optimizations
• Guide the growth and development of your reports, providing ongoing coaching and feedback, and helping them create opportunities for impact, visibility, and growth

Experience & Education:

• Bachelor’s Degree in computer science, or related field required; advanced degree preferred
• 6+ years of hands-on experience engineering complex software systems, development of highly scalable, high performance full stack applications using a variety of technologies
• Knowledge and expertise in Microservices Architecture, Data Centric application design, Event Driven Systems and cloud-native applications
• Hands on programming experience in one or more of Java, Kotlin, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go
• Cloud Native tools and technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, Envoy, Etcd, Istio, OpenTelemetry, Observability tools, IaC tools like Terraform etc.
• Having experience in one of more of the following with be a plus: AWS, GCP, Lambda, Serverless, Platform Engineering, Internal Developer Portals, GitHub Actions: when and how to use them and when not to.
• Experience delivering high quality software against aggressive timelines
• Proven experience identifying and influencing the most optimal technical decisions given business constraints
• Adept at providing frequent, candid feedback, and a passion for developing and coaching technical talent
• Passion for learning new technologies and deep technical curiosity
• Innovative problem solver with the ability to generate and implement a strategy
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• You know how to build diverse teams to solve complex technical problems
• You are an excellent communicator, with the ability to engage, influence, and inspire others to work toward shared outcomes
• You are curious, with a drive to understand how things work and how you can make them better
• You are comfortable balancing multiple priorities and know how to make progress in ambiguous and rapidly changing circumstances
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related field

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. American Express will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in accordance with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including, but not limited to, the California Fair Chance Act, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance. For positions covered by federal and/or state banking regulations, American Express will comply with such regulations as it relates to the consideration of applicants with criminal convictions.

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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