Senior Engineer

You Lead the Way. We’ve Got Your Back.

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 to move ahead, taking commerce to new heights, or encouraging people to explore the world, our colleagues are constantly redefining what’s possible — and we’re proud to back each other every step of the way. When you join #TeamAmex, you become part of a diverse community of over 60,000 colleagues, all with a common goal to deliver an exceptional customer experience every day.

The Amex in a Box engineering team is building technology to rapidly deploy the software that supports our issuing business. Our goal is to be able to stand up a new instance of “Amex as a service” in hours, not quarters, so that the company can move quickly to seize market opportunities and implement strategic priorities.

We’re looking for senior engineers to be part of a team that is just starting up, with the opportunity to use modern languages and tools and to deploy software in public cloud environments. Our cross-functional team will span the stack, from front ends to APIs to databases, and they will have all the skills and resources they need to build, ship and operate their own software.

Some of the problems we'll work on include:

How to set up the infrastructure and install the software for hundreds of applications at once

How to operate and evolve a set of global services with compute and data partitioned across geographically distributed data centers

How to modularize our architecture so that we can flexibly plug in market-specific capabilities like payment processing and credit reporting on a global scale

As a Senior Software Engineer (SE2) in our group, you will:

Help to scope complex technical projects within an engineering team

Directly contribute to the design and coding of our products, serving as a role model for how great software is built at Amex

Build software systems that are secure, reliable, scalable, and extensible

Make sound technical decisions utilizing the advice of teammates and lead technical conversations with other engineering teams

Mentor junior team members and assist with projects that develop their skills

We back our colleagues with the support they need to thrive, professionally and personally. That’s why we have Amex Flex, our enterprise working model that provides greater flexibility to colleagues while ensuring we preserve the important aspects of our unique in-person culture. Depending on role and business needs, colleagues will either work onsite, in a hybrid model (combination of in-office and virtual days) or fully virtually.

If the role you are applying for is designated as hybrid or onsite, you will be required to demonstrate that you have completed your primary COVID-19 vaccination series (i.e., 2 doses for Moderna/Pfizer and 1 dose for J&J) and, for medically eligible* colleagues, a booster shot, in order to work in or visit any of our offices. This requirement is subject to legally required accommodations.

*Booster eligibility: The CDC has established guidelines for when adults are eligible to receive booster shots depending on when they completed their initial vaccine series (currently five months after the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, and two months after the J&J Vaccine). If you have completed your primary vaccine series but have not yet reached your booster eligibility date, you will be able to come into the office; however, you will need to complete your booster within 30 days of becoming eligible to continue coming in and participating in company-sponsored in-person events.

Minimum Qualifications:

Qualifications - External You have been working as a senior engineer implementing complex software projects in a variety of business and technology environments

You have experience designing complex systems that deliver critical business impact

You are skilled in gathering and synthesizing users’ feedback and experience with your software

You are effective at giving and receiving constructive feedback to/from peers, team members, and leaders

You work well cross-functionally, and your colleagues at all levels and across all teams trust you

You are comfortable working in ambiguously defined problem spaces and can identify the most valuable areas to direct your energy and deliver tangible results

Technologies we use at Amex include:

Go, Java, and JavaScript on the server, with Kotlin and TypeScript starting to make headway

React in the browser

Code lives in GitHub Enterprise and flows to production through a CI/CD pipeline built on GitHub Actions

Code runs in Kubernetes-managed Docker containers hosted in a mix of private and public clouds

Other key tech includes GraphQL, gRPC, Kafka, Postgres, Couchbase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Redis, OpenTracing, Jaeger, Prometheus, and Grafana

In this position, you may choose to work either fully virtually or in a hybrid configuration, coming into a technology campus regularly but infrequently (approximately 2 days out of every 2 weeks). Our team will be distributed across the US and UK, and we expect every member to maintain 4 hours overlap with the US Eastern Time zone during a normal working day.

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

American Express is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, age, or any other status protected by law.