Staff Architect - Enterprise Architecture

American Express is entering into a technology transformation phase driven by opportunities to modernize legacy platforms and explore modern software to be on the leading edge of payment card industry. If you have the talent and desire to deliver innovative products and services at a rapid pace, with deep hands-on experience and strategic thinking, in areas of real time, high available and highly scalable APIs and Micro Services, join our Enterprise Architecture (EA) team to help transform the Amex legacy systems to a state of the art distributed and global processing environment. This individual will architect cutting-edge APIs and Micro services running on  different computing platforms for different line of business with in American Express, using latest computing techniques driving proof of concepts with strong hands-on experience. We expect the individual to be innovative and energetic with strong communications skills to adopt the concepts into production. 

About Enterprise Architecture (EA): 

EA as an organization aims to set the bar for technology at American Express. The two main drivers of EA’s success are its frameworks (common services to be leveraged by engineering teams across the enterprise) and its Major Engagements (high priority, business critical projects which need architectural guidance and support). This Staff Architect position will be expected to do hands-on programming to develop and test out proof-of-concepts (POCs), as well as work with product/business teams to design resilient, highly available, scalable APIs and Micro Services. 

Responsibilities: 

• Perform rapid POCs to experiment and build rails for the engineering team 
• Support engineers and project managers in rapid development and deployment 
• Actively participate in team and enterprise-wide architecture and engineering discussions. 
• Introduce enterprise architectural paradigms and solutions into the portfolio. 
• Drive both high level and detailed design and conduct design reviews 
• Engage and work with cross-functional leaders to understand and help define business principles, goals and strategy within scope of responsibility. 
• Communicate to senior leaders regarding strategy direction and changes. 
• Mentor engineers and solution architects to ensure technology complexities are understood very clearly to implement solutions expeditiously with high quality 

Minimum Qualifications: 

• 8 or more years of strong hands-on experience in Java and experience with backend or middleware processing.
• Extensive experience in designing and implementing large scale cloud-native platforms with high resiliency, availability, and reliability. 

• Strong experience in applications with high throughput and performance.
• Experience with microservices architectures and service mesh technologies is preferred.
• Strong written, verbal communications, presentation skills, leadership, problem solving and analytical skills. 
• Proven collaboration skills along with the ability to influence without authority.
• Hands on experience in the following environments is preferred: Java, Go, Vert.x, React, Envoy, gRPC, Protobuf, Postgres, CouchBase, Cassandra, Redis, Consul, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, GitHub Actions, Drools, Elastic Stack, Kafka, Spark, ML.
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Science Engineering, or related field 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.