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.

How will you make an impact in this role?

At American Express, our engineering teams power experiences that help customers move forward with confidence—whether enabling global commerce, delivering innovative digital experiences, or supporting critical financial journeys. As an Dir-Software Engineering, you will lead at scale, addressing complex technical and operational challenges unique to a global enterprise while driving reliability, automation, and AI-driven operations (AIOps) to enable predictive intelligence, automated decision-making, and self-healing production systems. You will operate within a diverse, inclusive, and intellectually curious culture that values problem-solving, collaboration, and continuous learning. We empower our leaders to think big, experiment responsibly, and deliver meaningful impact in a blameless environment—supported by strong mentorship, trust, and the ability to continuously evolve our people, platforms, and operational capabilities.

As an Dir-Software Engineering you will be accountable for end-to-end production operations for critical platforms and customer journeys, including availability, reliability, incident management, and operational excellence. At the same time, the Engineering Director will lead a strategic shift away from manual and reactive operations toward engineering-led, proactive, and self-healing systems.

You will operate at the intersection of engineering, operations, and platform strategy, partnering closely with product, platform, and risk leaders to ensure systems are built and run to meet the highest standards of resilience, performance, and customer experience.

Roles & Responsibilities:

Lead a team of engineers and grow the technical backbone of our organization.

Implement software development practices to build observability, alerting, tracing, automation and self-healing capabilities to maintain the highest levels of platform availability.

Performance tune and enhance the reliability of the infrastructure stack, for both public and private cloud. 

Hands on contribution to enterprise solutions, tooling, and initiatives leveraging your technical experience. 

Nurture an environment of innovation and continuous improvement, leading changes that drive efficiencies into existing engineering and delivery processes.

Lead experimentation and proof of concepts of new open-source technologies to solve observability, testing and resiliency challenges. Influence the technology adoption for the Customer Journey organization and broader company platforms.

Implement shift left automated testing to prevent defects from reaching production.

Ensure all new critical subsystems, microservices, databases and external calls meet the 5 9's availability requirement.

Provide consultation for all significant functionality changes and peer review critical production hotfixes.

Conduct technical code reviews and drive innovation across the organization to adopt industry best practices.  

Be part of a global operations team that support a 24/7 model, willingness to work holidays and weekends. 

Minimum Qualifications

8+ years of experience in large-scale software engineering, reliability engineering, or production operations within complex, distributed environments.

Proven leadership experience managing global, geographically distributed teams providing 24x7x365 production support for mission-critical systems.

Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and high-availability platforms.

Demonstrated ability to drive engineering-led operations, including reliability engineering, incident management, and operational excellence at scale.

Hands-on experience with automation, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and observability platforms (monitoring, logging, tracing).

Experience designing or operating systems that leverage predictive insights, automation, and self-healing patterns to reduce operational toil.

Ability to define and govern SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets, and to embed non-functional requirements into system design.

Strong people leadership skills, including building high-performing teams, mentoring leaders, and fostering a culture of accountability, learning, and psychological safety.

Proven ability to influence and partner effectively with engineering, product, platform, risk, and executive stakeholders.

Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical and operational topics to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Exposure to or experience with AI-driven operations (AIOps), such as anomaly detection, intelligent alerting, root cause analysis, or automated remediation.

Experience with public cloud platforms, Kubernetes, microservices, and service mesh technologies.

Background in financial services or other highly regulated, high-availability environments.

Track record of leading operational modernization or automation initiatives at enterprise scale.

We back you with benefits that support your holistic well-being so you can be and deliver your best. This means caring for you and your loved ones' physical, financial, and mental health, as well as providing the flexibility you need to thrive personally and professionally:

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.