Sr AI Engineer I - Agentic- Travel & Lifestyle Services Technology

American Express • Phoenix, AZ

5d • $123,000 - $215,250

About The Position

The Senior AI Engineer I – Agentic AI will build production-grade agentic systems that work with financial data, serve customers, and meet regulatory requirements. The role spans customer-facing LLM-powered features, agentic systems that automate financial workflows, and internal AI capabilities that help engineers build with AI safely and efficiently. This is an end-to-end engineering position involving solution design with product and design partners, production implementation, and ownership after launch. It requires autonomy, sound technical judgment, and the ability to deliver reliable products in a regulated financial-services environment.

The engineer will work within American Express Technology, supporting Travel & Lifestyle Services and the broader effort to build platforms, products, and governance for responsible agentic AI at enterprise scale. The technical environment includes Python, Go, TypeScript, AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes, REST, gRPC, event-driven systems such as Kafka, commercial and open-source LLMs, agent orchestration, RAG, vector storage, and evaluation and monitoring tools. Systems must meet high standards for reliability, security, and auditability.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful production experience with LLMs or applied ML systems.
• A track record of shipping AI-powered or agentic systems that real users depend on.
• Strong engineering fundamentals across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLM tooling and agentic patterns and architectures.
• Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows.
• Strong sense of ownership and sound technical judgment.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and turning it into a reliable shipped product.
• Strong product mindset and customer orientation.
• Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States; the company will not pursue visa sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building agentic systems in fintech or other regulated industries.
• Experience as a founding engineer or early technical contributor in high-growth environments.
• Demonstrated ability to ship technically complex systems in regulated contexts that customers actively rely on.
• Meaningful open-source contributions, particularly in AI or developer tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship LLM-powered and agentic product features that change how customers manage their finances.
• Build agentic AI systems that reason over context, invoke tools, take real actions, and recover gracefully from failure.
• Architect and implement production-grade RAG pipelines over sensitive financial data, with strict requirements for correctness, auditability, and safety.
• Contribute to shared AI infrastructure, including LLM services, agent orchestration frameworks, and evaluation and monitoring tooling, to scale agentic development across Amex Technology.
• Own systems in production, including their reliability, latency, cost, and failure modes.
• Work closely with product and design partners, focusing on customer outcomes as well as technical execution.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed