Senior AI Engineer I - Global Dining

American Express•New York, NY

About The Position

Joining Amex Tech means discovering and shaping your contribution to something big. Here, you can work alongside talented technology teams and build a unique career with the Powerful Backing of American Express. With opportunities to work with the latest technologies and a commitment to supporting the broader engineering community, our mission is to power your success. Amex Tech is powered by our technology, our culture, and our colleagues. The U.S. Consumer Services and Membership Digital Experiences Technology team (USCDT) brings together foundational strategic technology capabilities across digital experience engineering, marketing and advertising technology, enterprise communications, travel and lifestyle, and dining technology. The organization builds customer-facing capabilities that deepen digital engagement as well as core technology platforms that span business lines and customer segments. American Express Global Dining brings together world-class experiences through platforms such as Resy, Tock, and Rooam, creating seamless connections between diners, restaurants, and the broader American Express Membership ecosystem. Our mission is to define the future of hospitality and dining through technology, data, and design. As part of Team Amex, you’ll have the support, flexibility, and autonomy to make an impact while helping shape the future of how people discover, book, and enjoy dining experiences worldwide. At American Express, AI is reshaping the future of commerce and redefining the experiences our customers, merchants, and Card Members expect. Within Global Dining, housed within Amex Technology, we are applying AI to reimagine how diners discover and experience restaurants, how restaurants engage and serve their guests, and how our colleagues build and operate the platforms behind those experiences. Our focus is increasingly on agentic AI: intelligent systems capable of understanding context, reasoning, planning, using tools, and taking actions across complex workflows with appropriate levels of autonomy. These capabilities have the potential to transform dining discovery, reservations, restaurant operations, customer servicing, and the engineering systems that power the Global Dining ecosystem. We are building these capabilities with the reliability, security, explainability, observability, and governance required to operate AI at American Express scale.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, Computer Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience; advanced degree preferred.
Significant software engineering experience building and operating production AI/ML systems, including generative AI, LLM applications, or agentic systems.
Strong proficiency in Python and experience with one or more additional languages such as Go, TypeScript, or Java.
Strong understanding of modern AI architectures and techniques, including LLMs, NLP, retrieval/RAG, tool calling, structured generation, context management, orchestration, and evaluation.
Experience integrating commercial or open-source LLMs into real-world applications.
Experience designing scalable, distributed, API-driven systems and production services, with strong knowledge of reliability, latency, security, observability, cost, and performance optimization.
Experience building data pipelines and ETL processes using Spark, Hadoop, or comparable modern data-processing frameworks.
Experience deploying and operating AI models and pipelines using MLOps, CI/CD, and containerized infrastructure.
Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of production systems, from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.
Ability to navigate ambiguous technical problems, make pragmatic engineering decisions, and translate emerging AI capabilities into reliable customer experiences.
Experience mentoring engineers and improving engineering quality through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and hands-on collaboration.
Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to translate business requirements and complex technical concepts for technical and non-technical audiences.
Deep expertise in at least one technical domain, with the ability to develop expertise across adjacent areas.
Strong customer mindset and interest in applying AI to meaningful real-world experiences.

Nice To Haves

All systems are built to meet high standards for reliability, security, and auditability, reflecting the responsibility of deploying autonomous AI in a financial services environment
Use of AI-assisted and agentic development tools for design, implementation, testing, debugging, and refactoring
Learning how to apply these tools responsibly while maintaining production-quality standards

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate scalable production AI systems integrating ML models, LLMs, retrieval systems, and intelligent services.
Develop core GenAI and agentic capabilities, including RAG, agent/workflow orchestration, tool integrations, context management, structured outputs, and evaluation frameworks.
Integrate AI capabilities into existing production systems, partnering across engineering teams to meet technical, product, and business requirements.
Own the end-to-end production lifecycle of AI capabilities, including implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, evaluation, maintenance, and continuous improvement.
Build robust AI evaluation and safety mechanisms, including offline evaluation, regression testing, task-success measurement, model/prompt comparison, guardrails, permissions, validation, and graceful failure/recovery.
Design for production-scale requirements, including latency, throughput, availability, scalability, security, observability, cost, model variability, and failure modes.
Translate customer, restaurant, and business needs into AI solutions, partnering with Product, Design, Data, and business teams to identify high-value applications across dining discovery, reservations, hospitality workflows, and servicing.
Evaluate emerging models, frameworks, and AI technologies and help determine appropriate technical approaches for Global Dining.
Establish reusable AI engineering patterns and standards, including reference implementations and best practices for LLM and agentic systems.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship through architecture/design reviews, code reviews, hands-on collaboration, and guidance to other engineers.