Senior AI Engineer II - Forward Deployment - Enterprise AI Platforms

American Express•Phoenix, AZ

3d•$123,000 - $215,250

About The Position

As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer in American Express’s Enterprise AI Platform organization, you will partner with business units, product teams, and engineering organizations to identify high-value opportunities, translate business challenges into value propositions, and build solutions using Generative AI, agentic systems, and intelligent automation. You will guide opportunities from discovery and demonstration through proof of value, production scaling, adoption, and transition to long-term ownership, tying each stage to measurable outcomes while meeting enterprise requirements for security, reliability, and responsible AI. This is a hands-on engineering role with substantial stakeholder engagement. You will work alongside engineers to build and deploy reliable software, influence across teams without direct authority, and communicate with people of varying levels of technical familiarity and seniority. You will examine workflows as systems, challenge assumptions, identify opportunities for improvement, and set longer-term direction while sequencing practical near-term solutions. The role includes designing and delivering AI-enabled solutions, building integrations with enterprise APIs, knowledge sources, data platforms, and applications, and incorporating human oversight and fallback mechanisms. You will use AI-assisted engineering practices, evaluate agent-generated work, develop evaluation and monitoring approaches, and ensure appropriate security, privacy, risk, responsible AI, and regulatory controls. Successful patterns and components should be generalized for wider enterprise use and inform the AI platform and product roadmap. Occasional travel may be required for workshops or key delivery milestones; frequent travel is not expected. Roles may be based near selected American Express offices to support regional partnerships.

Requirements

At least 5 years of experience delivering software, technical solutions, or digital products in an engineering, architecture, or technical consulting capacity.
Demonstrated ability to take an ambiguous business or user problem through discovery, implementation, and measurable validation.
Experience using coding agents in a structured engineering workflow, including specification-driven development, context management, iterative implementation, and reusable knowledge repositories.
Software engineering fluency and ability to contribute directly to applications, integrations, services, or technical prototypes.
Experience in at least one relevant domain, such as mobile, web, backend services, APIs, distributed systems, platform engineering, workflow orchestration, or cloud-native development.
Ability to reason about systems end to end, identify constraints and leverage points, and connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
Strong communication and stakeholder-partnership skills, including explaining technical concepts, constructively challenging existing approaches, and influencing without direct authority.
Ability to define a longer-term direction and sequence incremental solutions that build toward it.
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Eligibility to work with American Express in the United States; the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or deploying solutions powered by language models, agentic systems, or AI-enabled process flows.
Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, tool calling, model context protocols, knowledge retrieval, or workflow technologies such as Temporal, LangGraph, LangChain, or LlamaIndex.
Experience designing human-in-the-loop controls and operational safeguards, with knowledge of AI evaluation, observability, and responsible AI.
Experience supporting technology adoption or operating-model transformation, particularly in financial services or another regulated industry.

Responsibilities

Build trusted relationships and understand business priorities, user needs, operational workflows, and sources of friction.
Challenge assumptions, map processes as systems, and identify technical, operational, and organizational changes that could improve them.
Lead discovery sessions to define use cases, value propositions, measurable success criteria, and solution direction.
Assess opportunities for business value, technical feasibility, user impact, risk, and adoption readiness.
Define a longer-term vision and identify a small, useful intervention that can validate an opportunity while supporting broader transformation.
Design, build, and deploy Generative AI, agentic AI, and intelligent automation solutions using approved enterprise platform capabilities.
Develop demonstrations and proofs of value to test assumptions and measure business impact.
Take solutions through prototyping, production scaling, adoption, and transition to long-term ownership.
Build agents and AI-enabled workflows that interact with enterprise APIs, knowledge sources, data platforms, applications, code, and business processes.
Incorporate appropriate human input, approval, escalation, and fallback mechanisms.
Work alongside engineering teams to build software and apply production architecture, testing, deployment, and operational practices.
Use experimentation selectively to reduce uncertainty while balancing speed with security, reliability, maintainability, and governance.
Use coding agents and AI-assisted engineering techniques to accelerate discovery, implementation, testing, documentation, and iteration.
Apply specification-driven development, context management, iterative planning, and structured knowledge repositories.
Evaluate agent-generated code and technical outputs for correctness, security, maintainability, and architectural alignment.
Identify opportunities for AI-enabled development practices to improve engineering throughput without compromising operational standards.
Generalize engagement patterns and components for broader use.
Partner with platform and product teams to turn successful prototypes into reusable features, accelerators, reference architectures, and implementation patterns.
Capture deployment lessons and use them to influence the enterprise AI platform and product roadmap.
Help teams adopt AI-enabled workflows and transition solutions into sustainable operating models.
Develop evaluation approaches covering solution quality, task completion, business outcomes, user experience, latency, cost, and reliability.
Identify and address failure modes through testing, monitoring, safeguards, and iterative improvement.
Ensure solutions meet American Express requirements for security, privacy, risk management, responsible AI, and regulatory compliance.
Establish appropriate controls for model access, enterprise data, tool use, human oversight, and production operations.
Communicate technical concepts, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations to audiences with different levels of technical familiarity and seniority.
Influence decisions and drive alignment across business, product, engineering, risk, and platform teams without direct reporting authority.
Maintain stakeholder relationships throughout discovery, delivery, adoption, and transition, and mentor partner teams on AI solution delivery.

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, offered for pregnancy, adoption, or surrogacy
Free access to global onsite wellness centers staffed with nurses and doctors, depending on location
Free and confidential counseling support through the Healthy Minds program
Career development and training opportunities