Sr Assoc-Tech Ops Engineering

American Express•Phoenix, AZ

About The Position

This role is responsible for the reliability, resiliency, performance, and modernization of critical American Express platforms across distributed environments. The engineer applies expertise in software engineering, runtime engineering, production support, and platform operations to assess and remediate availability, performance, and operational issues. The role partners with engineering, product, infrastructure, and operations teams to design, build, automate, and support highly available enterprise platforms, advance modernization, improve operational excellence, and deliver secure, scalable, resilient solutions. The position combines hands-on software and platform engineering with production support and runtime operations across distributed and mainframe platforms. It includes designing and implementing software and automation, troubleshooting complex issues, managing production incidents, improving reliability metrics, and supporting disaster recovery, high availability, capacity planning, and business continuity. Weekend support may be needed.

Requirements

At least 5 years of distributed experience and knowledge.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, or comparable experience.
Work experience in software engineering, application support, infrastructure operations, or runtime engineering.
Solid programming and scripting skills, including hands-on experience automating operational tasks with Python.
Knowledge of scripting languages such as PowerShell and Python for automation.
Experience in technology operations, such as ITIL, SRE, or production support.
Hands-on experience with relational and NoSQL databases such as DB2, Redis, PostgreSQL, and Couchbase.
Experience supporting and optimizing distributed technologies including Java, Python, SQL, relational and NoSQL databases, Git, CoPilot, Jenkins, XLR, Jira, AI, ML, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, REST APIs, gRPC, and Grafana.
Understanding of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and containerization technologies.
Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools and incident management practices in production environments.
Employment eligibility to work in the United States; American Express will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.
Availability for weekend support when necessary.

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting critical business applications.
Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Public cloud certification.
Experience supporting cloud infrastructure, Linux/Unix, containers, APIs, Java-based services, distributed databases, and modern application platforms.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, prototype, code, test, and implement scalable software solutions using technologies such as Java, Python, SQL, and related frameworks.
Contribute as a technical participant in change management reviews, root cause analysis, and troubleshooting complex technical issues.
Design and implement automation and engineering practices that improve platform resiliency, operational efficiency, and security.
Apply incident, problem, and change management practices in an application production support role.
Contribute to the technical roadmap for runtime systems and support platform reliability, scalability, availability, recoverability, and performance.
Establish, monitor, and continuously improve KPIs, SLOs, and operational metrics such as MTTR and MTBF.
Diagnose and resolve production incidents, batch failures, application outages, performance bottlenecks, and infrastructure issues across mainframe and distributed platforms.
Apply SRE principles and operational excellence practices to improve system stability and reduce operational risk.
Support disaster recovery, high availability, workload management, capacity planning, and business continuity initiatives.
Support and optimize enterprise platforms across distributed technologies and modern application platforms.
Implement and support cloud and distributed architectures, modernization initiatives, API enablement, and enterprise integration capabilities.
Develop and support enterprise integration using APIs, MQ, Connect:Direct, event-driven architectures, and batch and real-time data integration patterns.
Use relational and NoSQL databases to support critical business applications.
Automate operational processes, deployments, monitoring, reporting, and remediation using Python, Bash, Ansible, Jenkins, and related technologies.
Collaborate with engineering teams to develop scalable automation and self-service capabilities for deployment, monitoring, and operational support.
Implement and use monitoring, observability, logging, and analytics solutions.
Analyze operational trends, identify optimization opportunities, and recommend improvements to platform health and engineering effectiveness.
Contribute to continuous improvement in reliability, performance, security, operational maturity, and customer experience.
Use CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices with applicable tools.
Apply enterprise security controls, compliance requirements, audit standards, and access management practices.
Ensure solutions meet availability, scalability, performance, security, recoverability, and maintainability requirements.