Director, Portfolio Management

American Express•Phoenix, AZ

4h•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. Here, your voice and ideas matter, your work makes an impact, and together, you will help us define the future of American Express. The Director – Portfolio Management will report directly to the VP, Technology Portfolio Management (TPM), and partner across senior technology and business leaders. The successful candidate will have the ability to provide strategic insights to enable key investment decisions with a keen focus on operating expense management. In addition, this role will play a centralized role in coordinating variance reporting of Enterprise Critical Multiyear Initiatives and Enterprise Top Programs across the broader Tech Investment portfolio. The successful candidate will have deep investment analytics and financial management experience, relentless attention to detail, strong communication and influencing skills with extensive executive presentation experience, the ability to build and leverage positive relationships across various teams and natural intellectual curiosity to learn new and evolving technology capabilities to enable process efficiencies. The role requires the ability to motivate a team in a highly dynamic environment, a transformational mindset with a passion for change, and the capability to deliver high-level support for evolving portfolios with enhanced technical skills.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Finance, Accounting, Business Administration, or a related quantitative discipline; MBA or advanced finance degree strongly preferred
Ability to define plans to achieve long-term goals and analyze current technology landscape to forecast future trends and challenges. Setting a clear direction to ensure technology initiatives align with business objectives and prepares the organization for future opportunities and potential risks.
Ability to visualizes, constructs, and delivers compelling narratives for the appropriate audience supported by data in a way that provides contexts to inform business decision making.
Extensive experience in financial modeling, scenario analysis, forecasting, and executive-level financial summarization to identify risk and drive action
Demonstrated advanced Technical Skills, including but not limited to Power BI, Apptio, advanced Excel, TM1, Oracle and AI tooling (including ChatGPT and Copilot). Experience leveraging automation to create efficiencies.
Experience in building, leading, and mentoring diverse and global teams.
Excellent relationship skills and ability to interact with senior leaders with poise and confidence, influence management at all levels of the organization including the ability to partner cross-functionally with business partners with competing priorities and needs.
Demonstrated ability to give effective presentations and communications to all levels of leadership.
Strong knowledge of Tech Investment processes and tooling that drive Technology resource and financial management with an understanding of risk, controls, and compliance needs.
Passion for continual improvement and process design; seeks new ways to improve effectiveness, quality, and compliance
Confident and clear communication and relationship building skills, with the ability to navigate through conflict, influence leaders and drive progress in decision making
Ability to work autonomously and proactively to drive results

Responsibilities

Serve as a financial leader and strategic advisor across the enterprise. Drive prioritization decisions grounded in financial discipline, ROI, capacity constraints, and enterprise value creation.
Lead senior stakeholder engagement with a strong finance-first perspective, providing guidance on investment trade-offs, funding strategies, risk mitigation, and best practices to ensure delivery against financial targets while optimizing outcomes.
Manage Opex including mitigating capacity risks, negotiating trade-offs, and ensuring headcount forecasts and actuals are accurate and aligned to financial targets.
Oversee the preparation and delivery of high-quality financial variance commentary for Enterprise Critical Multiyear Initiatives and Enterprise Top Programs, synthesizing complex financial and delivery data into clear executive-ready insights under tight timelines.
Partner across Planning Leads to drive annual and in-year planning processes to ensure Technology Investments are aligned to the highest priorities and optimized across spend categories.
Provide data-driven financial insights to support portfolio-level capacity planning, investment decisions, and demand evaluation. Identify financial risks, funding gaps, and resource pinch points, and proactively recommend corrective actions.
Prepare and review portfolio updates with Unit CIO and Product leaders.
Proactively monitor initiative delivery against financial forecasts, budgets, and planned capacity, ensuring early identification of cost, scope, or delivery risks.
Build and foster a strong partnership with Tech Finance to collaborate and create deliverables for forecasting, annual and long-range plans.
Lead with positivity to retain, recruit, and inspire team members through times of transformational change.

Benefits

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