Director - AI Engineering - Mobile Engineering
About The Position
The Director of AI Engineering – Agentic AI leads the strategy, architecture, and execution of agentic AI systems across American Express Technology. This role builds and leads high-performing engineering teams that establish how agentic AI solutions are designed, built, and operated at enterprise scale. It combines technical and people leadership: setting technical direction and architectural standards, overseeing delivery of reliable and scalable agentic AI platforms, and hiring, developing, and managing engineering talent. The Director guides system design, reviews critical architectures, supports complex technical decisions, and ensures engineering excellence across multiple teams. The role focuses primarily on organizational leadership, technical oversight, and execution at scale rather than individual contribution. It partners with Product, UX, and enterprise stakeholders to shape agentic AI vision and roadmaps, influence investment and platform direction, and coordinate cross-team integration. The position is part of the U.S. Consumer Services and Membership Digital Experiences Technology team and the Mobile Engineering organization, which builds customer-facing mobile applications used by tens of millions of American Express customers worldwide. The work spans shared agentic AI capabilities such as agent frameworks, orchestration, planning, tool use, memory, retrieval and grounding, LLM infrastructure, evaluation, observability, and safety tooling. Systems are developed for an enterprise-scale, regulated, customer-facing environment, with emphasis on security, explainability, reliability, safety, and compliance.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems, together with strong experience in LLM systems, agentic workflows, or advanced ML infrastructure.
- Strong experience leading and growing engineering teams through complex deliveries.
- History of taking projects through the entire software development lifecycle, from inception to delivery, as a technical leader.
- Demonstrated experience coaching, mentoring, and developing technical professionals.
- Ability to lead engineering teams and negotiate or influence across organizational boundaries.
- Proven ownership of complex, cross-cutting agentic systems spanning multiple teams or products.
- Strong engineering fundamentals across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
- Deep experience across the agentic AI stack, including planning, tool use, memory, and evaluation.
- Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows.
- Ability to operate in ambiguous problem spaces and translate them into shipped, reliable autonomous systems.
- Ability to influence technical direction and align teams without formal authority.
- Experience in workflow engines, asynchronous processing, queues, and streaming systems.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building agentic systems in fintech or other regulated industries.
- Experience as a founding engineer or early technical leader in AI-driven products.
- Demonstrated success delivering technically complex autonomous systems that customers actively rely on.
- Meaningful contributions to open-source AI or agentic frameworks.
- Familiarity with fine-tuning, model optimization, and inference pipelines.
- Experience with modern application development technologies such as React, Kotlin, TypeScript, CircleCI, iOS/Swift, and Android.
- Comfort with languages and technologies including Python, Go, TypeScript, REST, gRPC, tRPC, AWS or GCP, Kubernetes, Kafka, LangGraph, LangChain, AirFlow, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, PyTorch, Hugging Face, TensorFlow, Pydantic, and Zod.
Responsibilities
- 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 pipelines; LLM infrastructure, inference, and model gateways; and evaluation, observability, and safety tooling.
- 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.
- Lead people with accountability, passion, enthusiasm, loyalty, and integrity; own HR processes such as performance reviews and talent development.
- Recruit talent with technical skills, growth potential, design sensibility, and emotional intelligence.
- Lead teams in iterative product development using lean principles.
- Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development through example and influence.
- Shape agentic AI vision and roadmaps with Product, UX, and enterprise stakeholders, influencing investment strategy, platform direction, and cross-team integration.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
