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.

Here, your voice and ideas matter, your work makes an impact, and together, you will help us define the future of American Express.

The Digital Workplace Data AI/ML Automation Platform with GENAI capabilities aims to bring together the data from all Unified Workspace, Collaboration and Colleague Servicing platforms; combining this with HR, Information Security, and network data to provide real-time, meaningful insights in areas such as user experience, health scoring, productivity, and overall IT visibility. As the Engineering Director of the Digital Workplace SW & Automations Platform, you will have responsibility for leading the engineering teams technically to develop the AI/ML, Automations, SW Ecosystem and GENAI platform and enhance it to provide personalization capabilities, analytics, and predictive analysis using AI/ML and GENAI.

Our winning aspiration is to deliver the best Colleague digital experience. We simplify work and raise productivity by empowering Colleagues with the best digital tools and services.

Opportunity for Impact

Digital Workplace at American Express is entering into a new phase of technology transformation driven by opportunities to improve Colleague experience, raise productivity and collaboration, and drive operational efficiency of all service and infrastructure operations. If you have the talent and desire to deliver innovative products and services at a rapid pace, with hands on experience and strategic thinking, in areas of productivity and collaboration software suites, endpoint computing and security, mobile platforms, data management and analytics, and software engineering, join our leadership team to help with our transformation journey.

Role and Responsibilities

The AI//ML platform with GENAI capabilities is central to the future of how we work and improve colleague experience while identifying opportunities for improvement. As the leader of this group, you will: Create and manage a complex distributed data engineering pipeline at scale and manage its availability, throughputs, and security.

• Lead engineering teams and partner with Product Management to enhance the quality and outcomes of the data products including data analytics & visualization
• Strong stakeholder management skills, influencing skills to talk to business and technical stakeholders.
• Lead the solutioning of Software and AI/ML models on the data to build meaningful insights & predictive analysis
• Work & collaborate with Product Management and Digital Workplace teams to influence key decisions on architecture and implementation of scalable, reliable, and cost-effective AI/ML and Software platform
• Bring thought leadership to advance the overall state of technology and customer focus for the platform
• Introduce Engineering and AI/ML enterprise architectural paradigms and solutions into the portfolio.
• Drive both high level and detailed design and conduct design reviews
• Engage and work with cross-functional leaders to understand and help define business principles, goals and strategy within scope of responsibility.
• Communicate to senior leaders regarding strategy direction and changes.
• Mentor engineers and solution architects to ensure technology complexities are understood very clearly to implement solutions expeditiously with high quality
• Manage delivery milestones, deployment cycles & delivery of the overall AI/ML Platform's roadmap
• Enthusiasm for staying up-to-date with the latest advancements in AI, NLP, and large language models.
• A portfolio showcasing previous language model projects, contributions to open-source projects, or relevant publications is a plus.
• Build, inspire, and grow talented engineering teams that are responsible for designing and building AI and LLM solutions, and Analytics suits
• Build culture of innovation, ownership, accountability, and customer focus
• Contribute to the American Express Data Strategy. Working with other Technology teams to drive enterprise architectural solutions, define best practice at a company level and further develop skills and experience outside Digital Workplace.
• Partner with the Digital Workplace technology teams to develop the AI/ML, SW Automations platform strategy across all products and channels.
• Participate actively and constructively in agile team meetings and application reviews
• Work directly with and learn from the business, product, and engineering leaders across the organization
• Strengthen the collaboration with Industry partners/suppliers for more robust data solutions and market research for innovative solutions in this space.

Professional Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams in remote and distributed product engineering setup.
• Experience writing software in Java, Python, Scala or similar.
• Experience with data structures, algorithms, and software design.
• Exposure to Data Science including Predictive Modelling.
• Develop Algorithms in multilingual conversational systems.
• Solve real-world scenarios for user commands and requests by identifying the right LLM models, tooling and frameworks.
• Strong foundation in machine learning concepts and techniques, including deep learning architectures, natural language processing, and text generation.
• Demonstrated ability to design, train, fine-tune, and optimize large language models for specific tasks.
• Familiarity with data augmentation techniques to enhance model performance.
• Knowledge of LLM operations , including evaluating model performance using appropriate metrics and benchmarks.
• Ability to iterate and improve models based on evaluation results.
• Experience in deploying language models in production environments and integrating them into applications, platforms, or services.
• Exposure in building Predictive models using machine learning through all phases of development, from design through training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
• Experience with modern SW Engineering architectural patterns, distributed platforms, CI/CD processes, deployment, and vulnerability management.
• Experience with modern AI/ML & NLP Frameworks (e.g. Tensorflow), Dialogue Managers (e.g.Rasa), Search (e.g. Google Bert, GPT-3), Parsers (e.g. Dialogflow).
• Extensive experience in designing and implementing large scale cloud-native platforms with high resiliency, availability, and reliability.
• Strong experience in applications with high throughput and performance.
• Experience with microservices architectures and service mesh technologies is preferred.
• Hands on experience in the following environments is preferred: Java, Go, Vert.x, React, Envoy, gRPC, Protobuf, Postgres, CouchBase, Cassandra, Redis, Consul, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, GitHub Actions, Drools, Elastic Stack, Kafka, Spark, ML.
• Review architecture and provide technical guidance for engineers
• Experience on various data architectures, latest tools, current and future trends in data engineering space especially Big Data, Streaming and Cloud technologies like GCP, AWS, Azure.
• Hands on experience with Big Data technologies (Spark, Kafka, Hive, etc.) and have at least 1 Big data implementation on platforms like Cornerstone, Teradata, etc.
• Experience with Visualization Tools like Tableau, Power BI, etc.
• Experience with complex, high volume, multi-dimensional data, as well as ML/AI models for unstructured, structured, and streaming datasets.
• Knowledge of cloud computing, including virtualization, hosted services, multi-tenant cloud infrastructures, storage systems, and content delivery networks
• Exposure in building cloud-native platforms on modern tech stack: AWS, Java, Spring Framework, RESTful API, and container-based application.
• Ability to learn new tools and paradigms in data engineering and science
• Proven experience attracting, hiring, retaining, and leading top engineering talent.
• Creative, passionate, and experienced leader of both technology and guiding teams.
• IC Tech Architecture savvy (e.g., technical roadmap, system architecture, GENAI platform architecture etc.).
• Experience with DevOps, reliability engineering, and platform monitoring
• Well versed in AGILE, DevOps and Program Management methods
• Bachelor's degree with a preference for Computer Science, Master's / Phd is a plus.

Salary Range: $144,250.00 to $256,250.00 annually + bonus + equity (if applicable) + benefits

The above represents the expected salary range for this job requisition. Ultimately, in determining your pay, we'll consider your location, experience, and other job-related factors.

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
• 6% Company Match on retirement savings plan
• Free financial coaching and financial well-being support
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits
• Flexible working model with hybrid, onsite or virtual arrangements depending on role and business need
• 20+ weeks paid parental leave for all parents, regardless of gender, offered for pregnancy, adoption or surrogacy
• 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

For a full list of Team Amex benefits, visit our Colleague Benefits Site.

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. American Express will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in accordance with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including, but not limited to, the California Fair Chance Act, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance. For positions covered by federal and/or state banking regulations, American Express will comply with such regulations as it relates to the consideration of applicants with criminal convictions.

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.

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