Job Description

With the right backing, people and businesses have the power to progress in incredible ways. When you join Team Amex, you become part of a global and diverse community of colleagues with an unwavering commitment to back our customers, communities and each other. Here, you'll learn and grow as we help you create a career journey that's unique and meaningful to you with benefits, programs, and flexibility that support you personally and professionally.

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.

Join Team Amex and let's lead the way together.

The Team

The Service Enablement Platform (SEP) team is responsible for multiple critical platforms that enable the servicing across all channels at American Express. This includes Case Platforms that are used for Global Disputes Management, Fraud Servicing, Credit, Collections and Back-Office Case processing besides Global Card Issuance and Automation.

From creating next-generation applications and microservices to leveraging AI, you could be doing transformational work that brings our iconic, global brand into the future. American Express is making continuous investments for building and scaling these platforms with security, resilience and innovation to meet our growth agenda and maintain trust, loyalty and premium experience for our customers. We are looking for strong leaders and engineers to be part of high energy and efficient teams that will bring our mission to life.

Responsibilities

As a Staff Engineer - Agentic AI, you will operate as a senior individual contributor within Amex Technology, helping define how agentic AI systems are designed, built, and operated across the company.

You will work at the intersection of agentic system architecture and hands-on execution: designing core frameworks, writing production code, reviewing critical designs, and guiding teams through complex technical decisions. This role does not include people management; your impact comes from technical leadership, sound judgment, and the ability to turn ambiguity into reliable, scalable agentic systems.

You will work closely with Product and UX partners to shape a shared vision for agentic AI experiences. While product team's own prioritization, Staff engineers are expected to actively influence what gets built and how agentic systems come together across teams.

This is an individual contributor, hands-on, deeply technical role with broad architectural ownership and high organizational impact;however, as the team grows, you will take on increasing responsibility for technical leadership and people development within the agentic AI space. Mentoring, developing and managing direct reports may be in scope for some of our opportunities.

What You'll Do

• Drive technical direction for agentic AI initiatives, influencing architecture patterns, autonomy boundaries, and system design.
• Design, build, and operate production-grade agentic AI systems used across multiple products.
• Own and evolve shared agentic AI capabilities, including:
• Agent frameworks and orchestration layers
• Planning, tool use, and memory strategies
• Retrieval and grounding (RAG) pipelines
• LLM infrastructure, inference, and model gateways
• Evaluation, observability, and safety tooling for autonomous systems
• Lead technical design reviews and help teams navigate tradeoffs involving autonomy, safety, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Partner across teams to deliver complex, cross-cutting agentic AI initiatives from concept to production.
• Evaluate emerging models, techniques, and agentic patterns and translate them into practical, enterprise-ready improvements.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development through example and influence.
• You will be responsible to architect and own coordination across multiple platforms across the portfolio, ensuring scalability, resiliency, and compliance with global standards
• Build POCs to experiment new technologies, databases and other application infrastructure.
• You will constantly pursue and learn industry leading/innovative technologies and solutions. Be acutely aware of enabling technologies and open-source products to build low latency distributed systems.
• Drive a culture of innovation and experimentation.
• Provide technical consulting support to Global Product teams and regional stakeholders for secure product rollouts
• Partner with risk, compliance, and cybersecurity teams to ensure solutions meet evolving regulatory and security requirements.
• Work with peers, Principal Engineers and Principal Architects to assimilate new technology and delivery methods into scalable software solutions, using and contributing to engineering best practices across the company

Qualifications

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

• Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript
• APIs and RPC: REST, gRPC (and in some areas tRPC)
• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes
• Distributed systems: event-driven architectures, including Kafka
• Orchestration Frameworks: LangGraph, LangChain, AirFlow, etc
• Integration of commercial and open-source LLMs into agentic workflows
• Agent and orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or CrewAI, with strong judgment about when to use frameworks versus building lighter-weight primitives
• Model-level work using PyTorch and the Hugging Face ecosystem (embeddings, fine-tuning, inference tooling), with some exposure to TensorFlow
• Strong schema, validation, and state management practices using tools such as Pydantic (Python) and Zod (TypeScript)

Agentic AI and ML

Across all systems, we emphasize evaluation, observability, safety, and reliability, reflecting the responsibility of deploying autonomous AI in a regulated, customer-facing environment.

What we're Looking For

• Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript
• APIs and RPC: REST, gRPC (and in some areas tRPC)
• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes
• Distributed systems: event-driven architectures, including Kafka
• Orchestration Frameworks: LangGraph, LangChain, AirFlow, etc

Preferred Qualifications

• Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript
• APIs and RPC: REST, gRPC (and in some areas tRPC)
• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes
• Distributed systems: event-driven architectures, including Kafka
• Orchestration Frameworks: LangGraph, LangChain, AirFlow, etc
• You have Computer Science / Information Systems degree, or equivalent with at-least 8+ years of work experience.
• Experience building intelligent solutions leveraging GenAI and other modern tech stacks
• Have built and delivered large scale enterprise systems/products.
• Have excellent written and verbal communications skills. Create and deliver effective presentations to Senior Leadership.
• Ability to partner and influence effectively across multiple business and functional lines, up to and including technology leadership team and business leadership team
• Exceptional leadership skills to inspire and support a diverse and inclusive team of industry-leading internal and external talent

About Us

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 our 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.

About the Team

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.