Director of Engineering in Payments

The Enterprise Technology Services organization partners with every part of the American Express business to power the company’s growth and innovation with trust and efficiency, and drive competitive differentiation with speed. We support the delivery and operations of technology, digital, and data capabilities, platforms, and services globally. Specifically, our team is responsible for the company’s technology engineering, architecture, and infrastructure, providing 24x7 support to ensure an uninterrupted, high-quality experience for customers and colleagues. We also provide product management for core enterprise platforms, and lead technology risk and information security, enterprise data governance and platforms, digital product and design, and enterprise AI platforms on behalf of the company.

At American Express, we know that with the right backing, people and businesses have the power to progress in incredible ways. Whether we’re supporting our customers’ financial confidence, enabling commerce or creating new ways for people and businesses to transact, our colleagues are continually redefining what’s possible.

American Express is undertaking a significant technology transformation in the Payments Network, modernising critical platforms while investing in the next generation of payments capabilities. Our ambition is to combine the scale, trust and resilience of American Express with modern engineering, cloud, data and AI capabilities to create payment experiences for an increasingly digital and connected world. 

The American Express Global Card Network Platform authorises and processes the company’s customer card transactions around the world. The Card Network is critical payment infrastructure, operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in a highly available, resilient and low-latency environment.

American Express continues to make strategic investments in its Card Network products and platforms to support the company’s global growth ambitions and the evolution of commerce. As payments evolve through tokenisation, digital identity, Agentic eCommerce, new authentication experiences and emerging forms of digital commerce, the capabilities of the network must evolve with them.

As our Director of Engineering in Payments, you will join our global technology organisation and lead multiple engineering teams – typically three to five – responsible for developing, operating and evolving critical capabilities within our next-generation payments platform. You will have the opportunity to shape the future of a major global payment network while developing engineering leaders and enabling new forms of digital commerce.

This is a senior engineering leadership role combining technology strategy, organisational leadership, delivery accountability and deep engineering judgement. You will be technically credible and comfortable engaging with engineers, architects and senior technical leaders on architecture, engineering practices, platform design and technology choices.

Your primary responsibility is to provide direction, develop engineering leaders, delegate effectively and create the environment in which engineering teams can deliver at their best.

The scale, criticality and pace of change within payments make this a challenging and rewarding environment. This role will suit a leader who is comfortable navigating ambiguity, managing competing priorities and leading teams through significant technology, business and organisational change.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Computer Science degree or equivalent practical experience, with at least 10 years of relevant professional experience.
• Experience delivering and operating large-scale enterprise platforms, including highly available, resilient, secure and low-latency distributed systems in demanding production environments.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native and distributed engineering, including service-oriented or microservices architectures, Linux and Kubernetes. Experience with Java, Go, Node.js or distributed/NoSQL technologies is beneficial; exact stack alignment is not required.
• Experience leading multiple engineering teams through engineering managers and senior technical leaders, with clear accountability for organisational performance and leadership development.
• Experience improving engineering delivery and operations through modern software engineering, agile and DevOps practices, automation and evidence-based performance measures.
• Experience leading significant technology, business or organisational change while navigating ambiguity, dependencies and competing priorities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, executive presentation, stakeholder influencing and negotiation skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

Specific payments experience is preferred but not mandatory. We welcome strong engineering leaders from payments as well as adjacent industries operating complex, high-volume, highly available or regulated technology platforms.

Experience in one or more of the following would be particularly valuable:

• Card network and transaction processing, including authorisation, issuing, acquiring, real-time and Single Message processing.
• UK retail and domestic payment schemes and infrastructure, including Faster Payments, Bacs, CHAPS and account-to-account payments.
• Digital payment experiences, including card and account-to-account journeys, tokenisation, network tokens, digital wallets and Click to Pay.
• Digital identity, payment security and authentication, including biometrics, EMV® 3-D Secure, fraud and risk controls.
• Emerging commerce, including agentic commerce and AI-enabled payment experiences.
• High-volume financial transaction processing and operational or regulatory resilience within financial services.

Candidates are not expected to have experience across all these areas. What matters is the ability to rapidly understand complex technology and business domains and apply strong engineering judgement and leadership to them.

Experience applying AI responsibly to improve engineering effectiveness is desirable. An informed perspective on agentic technologies and future payment experiences is also valuable; deep AI/ML engineering expertise is not required.
 

Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the UK is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.  

Business, Payments and Technology Outcomes

• Own engineering outcomes for critical distributed transaction-processing and payment capabilities, strengthening the Network’s ability to support business growth, improve processing efficiency, reduce the cost and complexity of technology change, and introduce new capabilities safely.
• Translate business and product strategy into clear engineering priorities, investment choices and technology roadmaps, aligning capacity with the highest-value customer and business outcomes.
• Account for platform economics and engineering investment, improving cost-effectiveness and capacity for innovation without compromising critical payment controls or service resilience.
• Make informed trade-offs between speed to market, scalability, resilience, regulatory obligations, technical debt and long-term cost of ownership, with clear accountability for the resulting outcomes.
• Own the engineering performance and operational effectiveness of multiple teams designing, building and operating high-throughput, low-latency and highly available payment systems; address systemic constraints across teams.
• Maintain sufficient technical depth to engage credibly in architecture, design, engineering practices and code quality, and to constructively challenge significant technology decisions.
• Partner closely with Architects, Distinguished/Principal Engineers and engineering leaders to define and evolve platform architecture and technology strategy.
• Champion modern engineering practices across cloud-native architecture, distributed systems, observability, automated testing, CI/CD, DevOps, resilience engineering and performance engineering.
• Maintain awareness of emerging technologies, open-source ecosystems and engineering practices relevant to high-volume, low-latency distributed systems and payments.

Engineering and Technical Leadership

Delivery, Operational Excellence and Change

• Lead engineering execution across multiple teams in a fast-paced environment where technology, business requirements and priorities continue to evolve.
• Translate product and technology strategy into executable engineering plans with clear priorities, dependencies, ownership and measurable outcomes.
• Establish meaningful engineering and operational performance measures to improve delivery predictability, engineering throughput, change quality, recovery performance and service reliability.
• Maintain clear ownership of production readiness and operational outcomes, including availability, performance, observability, recoverability, incident response and prevention of recurring failures.
• Identify technology, delivery and organisational risks early and work across teams and functions to resolve them.
• Create clarity and maintain momentum through periods of significant technology and organisational change, balancing short-term delivery commitments with longer-term transformation.
• Work effectively with Technology Risk, Cyber Security, Compliance and other control functions to ensure solutions meet the standards expected of critical payment and financial infrastructure.

People and Organisational Leadership

• Attract, retain and develop diverse, high-performing engineering talent.
• Lead through engineering managers and senior technical leaders, delegating decisions appropriately, establishing clear accountability and intervening directly when material risks or cross-team issues require director-level judgement.
• Shape team structures, ownership boundaries, technical capabilities and delivery capacity to support changing business priorities, reduce unnecessary dependencies and sustain organisational effectiveness.

Stakeholder and Strategic Leadership

• Partner closely with business and technology leaders, Product Owners, Architects, Engineering, Operations, Cyber Security, Risk and other stakeholders to deliver customer and business outcomes.
• Collaborate effectively with peer technology and product teams across different locations and organisational boundaries.
• Communicate complex technology decisions, trade-offs, delivery challenges and risks clearly to senior technology and business leadership.
• Influence stakeholders with different priorities and perspectives and create alignment around technology strategy, investment and execution.
• Exercise strong judgement when balancing customer outcomes, delivery speed, technology investment, operational resilience, regulatory requirements and long-term platform health.