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.

Engineering Director, Technology

The Communications Technology team, part of the US Consumer Services and Digital Technology team in the Technology Organization at American Express, brings together foundational strategic technology capabilities in digital and omni-channel communications. It employs a ground-breaking focus with development responsibilities for customer-facing capabilities that deepen and expand digital engagement, as well as core technical capabilities that cut across business lines and customer segments.

The Engineering Director, Technology will report into the Vice President – Enterprise Communications Technology, and will help us to move faster by identifying, driving and owning initiatives that will accelerate our success and scale. We wake up thinking how can we move from good to great; what systems, processes, tools or technology will drive efficiency and scale? We consistently seek to improve and innovate. We lead programs and liaise with partners across the organization to ensure we execute on opportunities for increased speed, efficiency, integration and impact.

In This Role, You'll Get To

• Be the 'go to' partner for the Enterprise Communications Technology, working with stakeholders across Technology to drive programs such as (illustrative examples, actual projects may vary):
• Drive Strategic Test & learn initiatives across the organization that fuel growth at scale
• Directly lead and accelerate our transformation and modernization roadmaps working closely with engineering leaders, Enterprise Architecture, product partners and external vendors
• Technical Oversight of strategic initiatives with vendor partnerships
• Lead efforts to progress key Enterprise Top Priority initiatives in our Tech Strategy owned by the organization (i.e. Best In Class Experience)
• Collaborate with key Engineering leaders and other partner teams to drive strategic initiatives, and define clear goals and success criteria.

On Your First Day, We'll Expect You To Have

• Experience as a hands-on engineer; you will have developed and shipped production software and are passionate about building a strong Engineering culture at American Express
• Strong experience in Quality assurance testing and automation
• Ability to wear multiple hats and context-switch frequently and seamlessly
• Willingness to 'think' strategically, while also being willing to 'act' pragmatically and get into the weeds if necessary, including being hands on and coding where needed
• Aptitude to balance trade-offs as you influence teams toward successful products
• Ability to Influence without Authority and thrive in ambiguous situations
• Strong bias for action
• Provide technical leadership to deliver software solutions that exceed customer and stakeholder expectations.
• You will constantly pursue and learn industry leading/innovative solutions. Build high awareness of open-source technologies and communities that enable high volume low latency systems.
• Lead a culture of innovation and experimentation, support full software development lifecycle that incorporates the best of technology approaches and delivery methodologies.
• Engage with developers in day-to-day activities and helping in review of design, coding and the SDLC tasks. Stepping into code where and if needed and be a hands-on leader
• Ensure on time product releases that are of high quality, enabling the core vision of next generation card processing systems compliant with regulatory requirements.
• Promote a fun and high engagement culture, with a result orientated focus. Hire, mentor, motivate and retain the best talent.
• Collaborate with peer technology and product teams across different locations.
• Leading a team in an environment which includes modern web frameworks and complex transaction processing systems leveraging a broad set of technology stacks (Java, Vert.x, Node.js, React, Cassandra, Kafka, Java, Mainframes, Oracle, DB2, REDIS etc.) 
• Communicate to senior leaders with regard to strategy direction and changes.
• Experience or background in running both technical and business programs, solutioning and delivering high stakes enterprise priorities .
• 12+ years of experience in developing and delivering leading–edge software solutions coupled with a proven experience in building teams from scratch and growing individuals into leaders.

It's Great If You Have

• Know how to work with Engineering and Product teams, and have solid experience with overall strategies, org structure & design
• A passion for operations and demonstrated experience in operationalizing processes, systems or practices at scale
• Knack for building relationships across the organization as you find creative solutions to high visibility questions
• Eager and able to soar at strategic levels as well as dive deeply into details (rolling up your sleeves) in order to deliver concrete outcomes
• Outstanding track record with cross functional partners
• Experience or background in running both technical and business programs

Academic Background:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Science Engineering, or related field required; Advanced Degree preferred.

Functional Skills/Capabilities:

• Excellent verbal and written communications skills required, with the ability to create and deliver effective presentations to leadership across the organization
• Proven ability to influence and drive delivery across a geographical distributed organization
• Experience attracting, hiring, and retaining top engineering talent.

Technical Skills/Capabilities:

• Experience with applications with high throughput and low latency needs.
• Experience in managing Quality Assurance Testing team and drive Automation
• Experience building highly available and low latency distributed systems.
• Experience building systems as service-oriented architecture and/or micro-services architecture.
• Development experience in modern technologies - Java, Go, Vert.x, React, JSON, etc. along with strong knowledge on databases including NoSQL DBs like Couchbase and Cassandra, J2EE
• Experience in CI/CD tools like Git, Bitbucket, Jenkins, Bamboo, Kubernetes, etc.
• Experience in Data Management & Analytics to manage our big data and analytics requirements

Behavioral Skills/Capabilities:

Enterprise Leadership Behaviors

• Set The Agenda: Define What Winning Looks Like, Put Enterprise Thinking First, Lead with an External Perspective
• Bring Others with You: Build the Best Team, Seek & Provide Coaching Feedback, Make Collaboration Essential
• Do It The Right Way: Communicate Frequently, Candidly & Clearly, Make Decisions Quickly & Effectively, Live the Blue Box Values, Great Leadership Demands Courage.

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.