Associate Tech Ops Engineer

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. 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?

As an Application Support Engineer, you will be a part of a global Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization, and partner with the Core Engineering and Platform Teams. You will work with engineering and product partners to ensure alignment between the organizations and contribute to the key strategic efforts. In this role, you will model and mentor talent across the pillars to ensure SRE is influential across the substantial product area engineering efforts.

Technical competencies:

• Actively participate and contribute to achieving SRE/App Support organization’s vision, mission and strategy from Enterprise Identity perspective
• part of a team (around 8-10 members) of highly talented Application Support Engineers.
• Be the Subject Matter Expert (SME) for all components of Enterprise Identity.
• Lead code reviews and automated testing
• As SME, guide and mentor the Application Support Team. Actively participate in resolution of production incident.
• Experience with service continuity, situation management, SLA management, Root Cause Analysis
• Participates in the development and deployment of preventive maintenance procedures.
• Contributes to the team's strategy to meet the agreed quality standards of delivery, documentation and reporting.
• Participates with the product engineering and delivery & integration teams via Retrospectives/Post implementation reviews to ensure quality standards are adhered to during development and implementation.
• Hands on experience on enterprise observability tools set such as ELF, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, BMC, Prometheus etc.
• Continuously improve automated remediation tasks to ensure the highest levels of availability.
• Responsible for evaluating and implementing orchestration, automation, and tooling solutions to ensure consistent processes and repetitive tasks are performed with a higher level of accuracy and reduced defects.
• Influence team members with creative changes and improvements by challenging status quo and demonstrating risk taking.
• Introduce new and impactful technologies to the production support tool chain that help minimize friction for production releases and support, and more quickly diagnose and recover from production incidents.
• Be an efficiency multiplier for your team by analyzing your workflow and driving the team to be more effective, productive, and demonstrating faster and stronger results.
• Facilitate the resolutions of non-application issues (3rd party upstream and downstream issues, infrastructure issues, storage, database, network, file transfer etc.)

Leadership:

• Ability to lead a geographically dispersed team that is composed of colleagues and contractors located across the US, UK, and India
• Strong interpersonal communication skills and the ability to work well in a diverse team-focused environment
• Liaise between SRE, development, Product Owners, and other partner teams to improve performance and availability
• Ability to build positive relationships with your team, business and technology partners to achieve established goals
• Ability to effectively interpret technical/business objectives and challenges and articulate solutions
• Influence and lead team members with creative thought leadership with data driven changes and improvements by challenging status quo
• Demonstrate the ability to effectively communicate to internal business clients and leadership on each facet of issue handling including (but not limited to): issue identification, service restoration, solutions to permanently resolve to ensure high levels of ongoing service etc.

Minimum Qualifications:

• At least 8 years of proven experience with system design, algorithms, data structures, analysis, and software design.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in computer science, Technology, or Engineering.
• Experience working in a 24/7 environment with on-call responsibilities to provide support to production support on a need basis.
• Proven understanding of cloud native principles: service discovery, circuit breakers, observability, distributed tracing, automation and monitoring tools.
• Demonstrated leadership and management experience in working with multi-functional, geographically dispersed teams on complex projects.
• Understands team dynamics and experienced at building teams that deliver results.
• Relentless drive to innovate in process and software to better meet the needs of our customers.
• Good Understanding monitoring technologies including logging, time-series etc.,
• Knowledge of configuration management, release automation, and orchestration technologies

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in a broad range of software development and operations technologies such as Cloud Infrastructure, virtualization, load balancing, containers, JVM’s, web servers, application debugging, queueing technologies, caching technologies, databases (RDBMS and NoSQL), routing and switching, etc.
• Excellent understanding of application development languages/platforms (Java, .NET, Big Data, Python, etc.) and importance of APIs and REST based services
• Excellent problem-solving, written, interpersonal and communication skills that drive executional impact at scale.
• Combines deep technical expertise, a continuous improvement and automation approach, and systematic and rational root cause analysis to find opportunities to make things faster and better.
• Appetite for trying new things and motivating change in a large and sometimes slow-moving organization.

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

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

Offer of employment with American Express is conditioned upon the successful completion of a background verification check, subject to applicable laws and regulations.