Director Software Engineering - Java, Microservices, AI/ML, Kubernetes, NoSQL

At American Express, our culture is built on a 175-year history of innovation, shared values and Leadership Behaviors, and an unwavering commitment to back our customers, communities, and colleagues. From delivering differentiated products to providing world-class customer service, we operate with a strong risk mindset, ensuring we continue to uphold our brand promise of trust, security, and service.

As part of Team Amex, you'll experience this powerful backing with comprehensive support for your holistic well-being and many opportunities to learn new skills, develop as a leader, and grow your career. Here, your voice and ideas matter, your work makes an impact, and together, you will help us define the future of American Express.

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 the payments industry. American Express is looking for strong leaders to be part of high performing teams that will build and support our next generation platforms. If you have the talent and passion to drive innovation and deliver at a rapid pace, with deep hands on experience in areas of real-time, highly available, cloud-native application development, join our engineering teams to transform our systems. 

At American Express, our culture is built on a 175-year history of innovation, shared values and Leadership Behaviors, and an unwavering commitment to back our customers, communities, and colleagues. From delivering differentiated products to providing world-class customer service, we operate with a strong risk mindset, ensuring we continue to uphold our brand promise of trust, security, and service.

As part of Team Amex, you’ll experience our powerful backing with comprehensive support for your holistic well-being and many opportunities to learn new skills, develop as a leader, and grow your career. Here, your voice and ideas matter, your work makes an impact, and together, you will help us define the future of American Express.

At American Express, Generative AI and other developments are reshaping the future of commerce and redefining the experiences our commercial customers and card members expect. Within Amex Enterprise Technology Services, we are building platforms, products, and governance that enable agentic AI systems to operate responsibly and at scale across the enterprise.

We do this by continually advancing our use of GenAI, other tools and modern ways of working to maximize the impact our leaders and our highly educated, passionate colleagues have on the business outcomes we pursue. 

Our focus is on agentic AI development: designing intelligent, adaptive systems that can plan, reason, and act across complex workflows with appropriate levels of autonomy. These systems power autonomous workflows, decision support, and customer-facing experiences—while meeting the high standards for security, explainability, reliability, and compliance required in financial services. 

American Express Global Card Network Platform authorizes and processes all of the company’s customer card transactions. The Card Network platform is the critical back bone for all of American Express card transactions, and is a near real time low latency system that is always available and highly resilient, processing transactions from around the world 24x7, 365 days a year. American Express is making strategic investments in new card network products and platforms to allow the company to meet its ambitious global growth agenda. American Express is looking for strong leaders and engineers to be part of high energy and efficient teams that will build and support our next generation card network systems.

Director - Software Engineering

As our Director of Engineering, you will join our global technology team that has embarked on building a highly available and scalable distributed systems on the cloud to support the company's long-term strategy and vision. Your primary responsibility is to build and support capabilities of our next generation distributed platform, build innovative payment capabilities leveraging the platform, aligning resources and delivery with business growth and diversification, while significantly improving service quality and cost-effectiveness. We expect the individual to be innovative and energetic with strong communications skills.

Key Initiatives

• Card Network Authorizations/Routing, and Clearing and Settlement

  
  

• Omni-channel platforms and partner connectivity management

  
  

• ATM, Debit, Credit and Push Payment Transactions, Real Time Settlement, Multi-rail Payments

  
  

• AI adoption to increase engineering efficiency, improve delivery quality and generate differentiated business outcomes

  
  

• Platform Engineering and Foundational Capabilities of distributed systems

  
  

• High Availability, Resiliency and Performance Engineering on Cloud

  
  

Responsibilities

• You will be responsible for building capabilities of a distributed transaction processing infrastructure and payment processing business logic by leveraging that platform. Leading and engaging technical teams that builds/deploys high throughput systems.

  
  

• 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.

  
  

• Ensure identification, design and implementation of AI/GenAI solutions to optimize engineering efficiency, enhance delivery quality and generate measurable, differentiated business outcomes Experience building agentic systems in fintech or other regulated industries preferred

  
  

• 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.

  
  

• Promote a fun and high engagement culture, with a results orientated focus. Hire, mentor, motivate and retain the best talent.

  
  

• Collaborate with peer technology and product teams across different locations. 

  
  

• You have Computer Science degree, or equivalent with at-least 10+ years of work experience and at least 5 years of leadership role experience.

  
  

• Have built and delivered large scale enterprise systems/products and have extensive hands-on experience. Preferably delivered and supported products as Cloud hosted services.

  
  

• Experience building highly available and low latency distributed systems. Experience building systems as service-oriented architecture and/or micro-services architecture.

  
  

• Keen awareness of concerns in a massively distributed systems and effective solutions.

  
  

• Experience in Linux cloud (Kubernetes) environment supporting applications built using language like Java, Go, Node.js and NoSQL databases like Couchbase, Cassandra, Redis.

  
  

• Experience in designing and delivering AI/ML solutions that yielded measurable business impact, improved engineering efficiency and/or enhanced delivery quality across the SDLC

  
  

• Experience attracting, hiring and retaining top engineering talent.

  
  

• Have experience leading engineering teams and in agile methodologies, have enabled DevOps mindset, processes and tools

  
  

• Ability to learn and deep dive into new technology and business domains, question status quo and think outside of the box.

  
  

• Excellent judgment and constant pursuit of higher standards, a passion to build and nurture high efficiency teams.

  
  

• Have excellent written and verbal communications skills.

  
  

• Create and deliver effective presentations to Senior Leadership.