Staff AI Engineering - Enterprise AI Platforms

American Express • Sunnyvale, CA

1d

About The Position

American Express Technology’s Enterprise AI Platform organization builds foundational capabilities that enable teams across the company to develop and scale AI, machine learning, and generative AI products securely and responsibly. The organization is focused on enabling American Express to operate as an AI-powered enterprise and deliver measurable business impact through agentic AI systems that can plan, reason, and act across complex workflows while meeting financial-services standards for security, explainability, reliability, and compliance.

The Staff Data Engineer – Agentic AI is a senior, hands-on individual contributor who helps define how agentic AI systems are designed, built, and operated across the company. The role combines architectural ownership with production engineering: designing core frameworks, writing production code, reviewing critical designs, and guiding teams through complex technical decisions. It has broad organizational impact and no standard people-management responsibility, though mentoring, technical leadership, and—in some opportunities—people development or managing direct reports may become part of the role as the team grows.

The engineer partners with Product and UX teams to shape agentic AI experiences and influences what gets built and how capabilities come together across teams. The position focuses on building reliable, scalable, production-grade agentic systems and shared platform capabilities, balancing autonomy, safety, reliability, scalability, and cost in a regulated, customer-facing environment.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong experience with LLM systems, agentic workflows, or advanced ML infrastructure.
• Proven ownership of complex, cross-cutting agentic systems spanning multiple teams or products.
• Strong engineering fundamentals across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Deep experience across the agentic AI stack, including planning, tool use, memory, and evaluation.
• Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows.
• Ability to operate in ambiguous problem spaces and translate them into shipped, reliable autonomous systems.
• Ability to influence technical direction and align teams without formal authority.
• Experience in workflow engines, asynchronous processing, queues, and streaming systems.
• Comfort working in a modern, enterprise-scale engineering environment with a strong emphasis on agentic AI.
• The role’s technical environment includes Python, Java, Go, and TypeScript; REST and gRPC APIs (and, in some areas, tRPC); AWS and/or GCP; Kubernetes; event-driven distributed systems including Kafka; and orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, and Airflow.
• Experience integrating commercial and open-source LLMs into agentic workflows and using agent frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or CrewAI, with judgment about when to use frameworks versus lighter-weight primitives.
• Model-level familiarity with PyTorch and the Hugging Face ecosystem, including embeddings, fine-tuning, and inference tooling; some exposure to TensorFlow.
• Strong schema, validation, and state-management practices using tools such as Pydantic and Zod.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building agentic systems in fintech or another regulated industry.
• Experience as a founding engineer or early technical leader in AI-driven products.
• Demonstrated success delivering technically complex autonomous systems that customers actively rely on.
• Meaningful contributions to open-source AI or agentic frameworks.
• Familiarity with fine-tuning, model optimization, and inference pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical direction for agentic AI initiatives, influencing architecture patterns, autonomy boundaries, and system design.
• Design, build, and operate production-grade agentic AI systems used across multiple products.
• Own and evolve shared agentic AI capabilities, including agent frameworks and orchestration layers; planning, tool use, and memory strategies; retrieval and grounding (RAG) pipelines; LLM infrastructure, inference, and model gateways; and evaluation, observability, and safety tooling.
• Lead technical design reviews and help teams navigate tradeoffs involving autonomy, safety, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Partner across teams to deliver complex, cross-cutting agentic AI initiatives from concept to production.
• Evaluate emerging models, techniques, and agentic patterns and translate them into practical, enterprise-ready improvements.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development through example and influence.
• Work closely with Product and UX partners to shape a shared vision for agentic AI experiences and influence how systems are built across teams.

What This Job Offers

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