Principal Engineer

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.

American Express has a key focus on modernizing its Global Payment and Card Network. This network is the critical backbone for American Express’s payment products and connects all our consumer transactions with our Merchants/Acquirers to our card Issuers. As part of this modernization effort, we are enabling new products and markets, and launched the first foreign payment network in China on this modernized platform. The Payment Authorization platform is a low latency platform that processes millions of transactions in a day and thousands of transactions per second and is always available and highly resilient processing transactions from around the world 24x7, 365 days a year.

 In this role, you will serve as a lead engineer supporting our core payment processing platform for local market processing compliance related requirements as well as building cloud native payment capabilities. You will be working closely various stakeholders in the Product team and cloud platform teams to define architecture as well as implement critical system designs. You will be responsible for enhancing our highly available, low latency transaction platform to support existing card product as well as new payment products.

 Day-to-day responsibilities include:

• Lead engineering design and implementations enhancing capabilities of high throughput low latency payment transaction platform
• Define and drive architecture solutions working with enterprise architects and product stakeholders
• Deliver hands-on design, coding and release of new capabilities of enterprise systems that can be brought to bear for a broad set of business use cases
• Influence non-functional requirements, performance & scalability, reliability and testability of system designs and guide design decisions
• Functionally decompose complex business and technical problems into simple, workable solutions that demonstrate significant creativity and high discernment
• Evaluate and adopt open-source products and technologies, incorporate internal and industry best practices
• Understand and use system interdependencies while minimizing their limitations
• Exert technical influence over multiple teams, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing deep knowledge and experience
• Spend minimum of 25% of the time on implementation efforts and assignments

 Outcomes for this role are:

• Evolution of next generation payment network platform on a cutting-edge platform, adopting emerging technologies to deliver new products on distributed architecture on cloud.
• Design solutions with a focus on innovation in software and faster process to that meets the needs of our customers.
• Encourage an attitude of collaboration, influence without authority, build mutual trust and transparency within the engineering organization.
• Evolve architectural designs working with product teams, which embraces a holistic view of the business including identifying possible future business opportunities.

 Apply if you have the following qualifications:

• 10+ years of active engineering experience in a complex environment and/or comparable experience
• Experience in building applications that shows mechanical sympathy allowing for high performance and reliability on a distributed/cloud infrastructure using commodity hardware
• Experience with modern system programming languages that is optimized for performance and concurrency with better/simpler memory management models (e.g., Golang, Rust)
• Demonstrated skills in building and deploying cloud native applications with service-oriented architecture and micro-services
• Strong software architectural vision, ability to lead strategy with a pragmatic roadmap and approach that is balanced with needs for product delivery. Creation of Engineering Best Practices embraced by a large segment of the technology organization
• Creation of tools or other technologies that become integral to the operation of the platform. Successful assimilation of new technology into an existing technology stack
• Bachelor’s Degree in computer science, computer science engineering, or related field required; advanced degree preferred
• Experience in high transaction volume on distributed systems and/or cloud is a must
• Experience is NoSQL DB technologies (e.g., Cassandra, Redis, Couchbase), Cloud enabler technologies and frameworks (e.g., Envoy, Consul, Vault, etcd, grpc), container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker Compose).
• Experience and success with open-source and inner-source operating models and contribution

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

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.