Director AI Engineering
American Express
Director AI Engineering
American Express
Issues credit cards and runs a payment network
Joining Amex Tech means discovering and shaping your contribution to something big. Here, you can work alongside talented tech teams and build a unique career with the Powerful Backing of American Express. With a range of opportunities to work with the latest technologies, and a commitment to back the broader engineering community through open source, our mission is to power your success. Because Amex Tech is powered by our technology, our culture, and our colleagues.
The Technology organization enables and accelerates the company’s growth strategies, delivering global capabilities and services in support of Amex’s customers and colleagues, while maintaining 24/7 servicing and availability to ensure an uninterrupted, high-quality customer experience. Technology provides the foundation for everything we do in the company while driving differentiation through building and leveraging innovative technology and data insights.
At American Express, AI is reshaping the future of commerce and redefining the experiences our commercial customers and card members expect. Within Amex Technology, we are building platforms, products, and governance that enable agentic AI systems to operate responsibly and at scale across the enterprise.
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.
We partner closely with product, design, and business teams to deliver agentic capabilities that reduce operational friction, improve decision-making, and transform how customers interact, transact, and grow.
The U.S. Consumer Services and Membership Digital Experiences Technology team (USCDT) brings together foundational strategic technology capabilities in digital experience engineering (Mobile and Web), marketing and advertising technology, enterprise communications, travel and lifestyle, and dining technology. It employs a ground-breaking focus with development responsibilities for customer-facing capabilities that deepen and expand digital engagement, as well as core technical capabilities that cut across business lines and customer segments.
You’ll be part of the Mobile Engineering team whose mission is to be essential in our customers’ digital lives by providing value, convenience, and delight wherever they are. You will be responsible for leading a team of mobile engineers building mobile applications that will be used by tens of millions of American Express Customers around the world.
As a Director of AI Engineering – Agentic AI, you will lead the strategy, architecture, and execution of agentic AI systems across Amex Technology. You will be responsible for building and leading high-performing engineering teams that define how agentic AI solutions are designed, built, and operated at scale across the enterprise.
This role combines deep technical leadership with people leadership. You will set technical direction, establish architectural standards, and ensure delivery of reliable, scalable agentic AI platforms—while also hiring, developing, and managing engineering talent. Your impact will come from shaping long-term strategy, cultivating strong engineering culture, and enabling teams to turn ambiguity into production-grade systems.
You will operate at the intersection of vision and execution: guiding system design, reviewing critical architectures, partnering on complex technical decisions, and ensuring engineering excellence across multiple teams. While you may engage in hands-on technical discussions, your primary focus will be organizational leadership, technical oversight, and execution at scale rather than individual contribution.
You will work closely with Product, UX, and enterprise stakeholders to shape the vision and roadmap for agentic AI experiences. Product teams own prioritization, but as a Director you will influence investment strategy, platform direction, and cross-team integration to ensure cohesive, enterprise-ready solutions.
What We’re Looking For
Experience in workflow engines, async processing, queues, and streaming systems.
Preferred Qualifications
Depending on factors such as business unit requirements, the nature of the position, cost and applicable laws, American Express may provide visa sponsorship for certain positions.
What You’ll Do
Technical Environment
We don’t hire to a narrow checklist, but candidates should be comfortable operating in a modern, enterprise-scale engineering environment with a strong emphasis on agentic AI.
Core engineering stack
Agentic AI and ML
Strong schema, validation, and state management practices using tools such as Pydantic (Python) and Zod (TypeScript)
Across all systems, we emphasize evaluation, observability, safety, and reliability, reflecting the responsibility of deploying autonomous AI in a regulated, customer-facing environment.
Salary Range: $144250 - $256250 annually + bonus + equity (if applicable) + benefits
Issues credit cards and runs a payment network
American Express issues credit and pay-in-full charge cards to consumers and businesses, and unlike most card issuers it also runs the payment network its cards use. Its Travelers Cheque, launched in 1891, made carrying money abroad safer, and in 1959 it became the first major issuer of plastic cards. Cardholders earn points toward flights and hotels plus perks such as airport lounges, while companies use its corporate cards for employee travel and expenses. American Express earns a fee from merchants on each purchase, plus annual fees and interest on balances cardholders carry. Henry Wells and William Fargo, who later started Wells Fargo, co-founded it in 1850 as a freight delivery business; it is based in New York City.
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