Director-Software Engineering

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.
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Engineering Director – Customer Domain Engineering

The Customer Domain Engineering organization is part of the larger Enterprise CRM Solutions team where engineering and delivery resources have been organizationally brought together to improve speed to market and further unlock value across core customer capabilities.

Customer domain is playing a pivotal role in shaping the organization strategy for managing customer data enterprise wide establishing Customer360 (C360) as a trusted authority in customer data management and creating a single source of truth about customers' profile data. C360 Platform provides a holistic view of the customer's relationships with various American Express products and manages customers demographics and linkages driving intelligent insights for servicing , marketing , risk, fraud, and digital experiences. This platform is an integral part of all enterprise customer journeys and is at the fore front of all the new initiatives the organization is undertaking. In C360, we build and manage highly scalable services using event-driven reactive architecture.

The Director of Engineering will lead the strategy and roadmap for Customer 360 (C360), spanning multiple functions. This includes driving business delivery and transformation by harnessing data to generate business value, enhancing revenue, strengthening fraud protection, and delivering a unified customer experience. The role involves overseeing the end-to-end data lifecycle to ensure data is high-quality, accessible, well-governed, and available through self-service solutions.

Additionally, this leader will define and execute the platform strategy and modernization agenda, designing scalable, resilient, and simplified systems to boost operational efficiency. A strong focus will also be placed on enabling data-driven decision-making and automating insights to improve business outcomes. The Engineering Director will play a pivotal role in sustaining and accelerating the momentum of C360, continuously delivering tangible value to business stakeholders and customers alike.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Lead the delivery of complex data-driven and customer-focused solutions by coordinating across multiple agile teams and aligning with strategic goals of the Customer domain.
• Translate business objectives into actionable engineering plans, ensuring that product and platform roadmaps reflect both technical feasibility and customer value.
• Partner with cross-functional leaders in product, architecture, and data governance to shape and influence platform strategy, balancing short-term delivery with long-term technical evolution.
• Enable high-performing engineering teams through mentorship, feedback, and coaching, while fostering a culture of accountability, ownership, and engineering excellence.
• Oversee the implementation of robust, scalable systems that support real-time and batch data capabilities, while ensuring alignment with enterprise architectural standards.
• Drive a pragmatic approach to technical innovation, ensuring that new tools and technologies are introduced with a clear value proposition and minimal disruption to delivery velocity.
• Champion a customer journey-first approach, ensuring technical solutions align with broader business outcomes like user experience, data insights, and operational efficiency.
• Ensure engineering rigor and adherence to best practices in software development, data management, information security, and system resilience.
• Monitor engineering health metrics including code quality, deployment frequency, incident response, and team engagement to drive continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with other Engineering Directors and Staff Architects to embed modern engineering practices (Github Actions, cloud-native, event-driven architectures) into ongoing development & Deployment efforts.
• Support stakeholder communications by articulating technical progress, trade-offs, and risks clearly and effectively to senior leadership.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 10+ years of active experience in design, engineering, and implementation of complex & large scale applications & enterprise-grade software products.
• Demonstrated recent hands-on engineering experience with core technologies such as, Java, JavaScript, Vert.X, Kafka, Elastic, Couchbase, and/or Postgres and restful, event driven, and microservices technologies for large scale environments.
• Hands-on experience in using Relational databases like Postgres, MySQL and NOSQL databases like Couchbase,
• Working knowledge of message queuing, stream processing, and highly scalable ‘big data’ data stores
• Opinionated on developer experience and developer productivity with proven experience in elevating the same at scale.
• Recent experience with agile development methodologies.
• Subject matter expertise in one or more software engineering specialties with broad exposure to relevant technology domains.
• Demonstrated expertise in designing highly available, fault-tolerant, and highly scalable cloud native platforms.
• Ability to participate in the prevention, diagnosis, and resolution of system outages as an expert in the underlying platform architecture.
• Be a compelling storyteller with experience communicating complex technical concepts and ideas to engineers and non-engineers alike.
• Coach and mentor the professional and technical development of your team members.
• Maximizing team and enterprise productivity by understanding the intricacies of work and removing roadblocks
• Proven experience attracting, hiring, retaining and leading top engineering talent and building high performing teams in a highly competitive market.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related field

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.