Director - Data Engineering - Agentic AI

American Express•New York, NY

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

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 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 Technology organization enables and accelerates the company’s growth strategies, delivering global capabilities and services in support of Amex’s customers and colleagues, while maintaining 24/7 servicing and availability to ensure an uninterrupted, high-quality customer experience. Technology provides the foundation for everything we do in the company while driving differentiation through building and leveraging innovative technology and data insights. 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.

Requirements

10+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems + strong experience with LLM systems, agentic workflows or advanced ML infrastructure
Strong experience leading and growing teams of fellow engineers through complex deliveries
A 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.
Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and translating them into shipped, reliable autonomous systems.
Ability to influence technical direction and align teams without formal authority.
Experience in workflow engines, async 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 is a plus

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 (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.
Demonstrate accountability while leading people with passion, enthusiasm, loyalty and integrity.
Own and lead HR processes such as performance reviews, talent development, etc.
Recruit top 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.

Benefits

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