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 will 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. 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.  

American Express is entering into a technology transformation phase driven by opportunities to modernize legacy platforms and explore modern software to be on the leading edge of the payments industry. American Express is looking for strong leaders to be part of high performing teams that will build and support our next generation platforms. If you have the talent and passion to drive innovation and deliver at a rapid pace, with deep hands-on experience in areas of real-time, highly available, cloud-native application development, join our engineering teams to transform our systems.    

American Express Global Card Network Platform authorizes and processes all the company's customer card transactions. The Card Network platform is the critical back bone for all American Express card transactions and is a near real time low latency system that is always available and highly resilient, processing transactions from around the world 24x7, 365 days a year. American Express is making strategic investments in new card network products and platforms to allow the company to meet its ambitious global growth agenda. American Express is looking for strong leaders and engineers to be part of high energy and efficient teams that will build and support our next generation card network systems.  

Engineering Director  

As our Director of Engineering, you will join our global technology team that has embarked on building highly available and scalable distributed systems on the cloud to support the company's long-term strategy and vision. Your primary responsibility is to build and support capabilities of our next generation distributed platform, build innovative payment capabilities leveraging the platform, aligning resources and delivery with business growth and diversification, while significantly improving service quality and cost-effectiveness.  We expect the individual to be innovative and energetic with effective communication skills. 

Responsibilities: 

• Engineering: Emphasis on high-quality software releases through innovation, efficient test data, robust test environment management, best-in-class frameworks such as standardized pipelines, test automation, and performance engineering. 

• Strategy: Develop and implement strategies to ensure all IT products and services meet organizational standards and end-user requirements. Influence best practices in code health, testing, testability and maintainability (clean code, test pyramid). 

• Testing & Automation: Drive test automation initiatives, aiming for high automated test coverage across products to accelerate development and release processes. 

• Process Improvement: Enhance quality processes and improve efficiency by applying innovative solutions. 

• Collaboration: Work closely with development teams, product managers, and QA teams to integrate quality practices early in the development lifecycle. 

• Performance Engineering (Performance and Chaos): Use baseline SLA's established by Architects and business to monitor performance and chaos results before every release into production and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor quality.

• Technical Expertise: Provide technical leadership in evaluating and identifying tooling, automation opportunities, and continuous improvement using emerging technologies. 

• Stakeholder Communication: Synthesize and report on testing results and quality metrics. 

• Team Leadership: Build, mentor, and manage a team of quality engineers, providing technical guidance, coaching, and capacity allocation. 

• Domain Knowledge: Develop a solid understanding of new functionalities and integration on Payment Network and Acquirer End-to-End functionalities. 

• Metrics: Track test gaps, quality, productivity, and DORA metrics. Synthesize testing results and other measures into meaningful reports.

Qualifications:

• Technical credibility: Experience as a Software Engineer in Test (or similar title) 

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills to effectively express ideas, engage in complex discussions and collaborate with a wide range of colleagues 

• Superior analytical, problem solving and planning skills with the desire to continually learn and improve 

• Self-motivated and able to manage multiple tasks simultaneously 

• Strong relationship building skills and proven ability to influence and drive delivery across a geographical distributed organization with the demonstrated ability to debate ideas/ strategies and be comfortable managing constructive conflict  

• Strong people leader exhibiting passion, enthusiasm, loyalty, and integrity through a servant leadership personification promoting the development of talented, energetic, creative, and highly dedicated team members 

Technical Qualifications:

Extensive Experience in: 

• Java development with frameworks such as Vert.x, Spring Boot, and Spring Batch. 2+ years of experience in developing code in Golang

• Automated testing using industry common framework such as Cucumber, Karate and Serenity

• Test Data Management such as production extraction, scrubbing, synching up, self-serve, backup and versioning using industry or custom tools  

• SQL and NOSQL databases such as Cassandra, Postgres, MongoDB and Couchbase  

• Microservices based architecture and containerizing using Docker

Demonstrated Proficiency in: 

• CI-CD tools such as Jenkins, XL-R and GitHub Actions 

• Managing test environments such as ephemeral and dynamic environments using Terraform in On-Prem/Public Cloud and distributed applications and IaaS-based environments

• Performance and chaos engineering, including load, endurance, destructive, multi-data center, and data center testing 

Solid Understanding of:

• Payment Network and Acquirer End-to-End functionalities  

• DevOps technical leadership with hands-on experience with build, integration, release, deployment, and scaling big data tools including Spark and Lumi 

Familiar with most of the following tools and frameworks:

• Unit Test: Quality: JUnit, Mockito SonarQube

• Test Data Management: Optim and any custom tools

• Automation Tools: Selenium, WireMock, RestAssured, Cucumber, Karate and Serenity

• Test Frameworks: TDD and BDD

• Test Environment Management: Prometheus, ELK, Grafana, etc.

• Performance: k6, JMeter, DART and Litmus Test

• Knowledge in Gen AI technology to automate use cases on software development life cycle 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%25 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.