Staff AI Engineering - Enterprise Architecture
About The Position
As a senior individual contributor within American Express Technology, the Staff Software Engineer – Agentic AI helps define how agentic AI systems are designed, built, and operated across the company. The role combines agentic system architecture with hands-on execution, including designing core frameworks, writing production code, reviewing critical designs, and guiding teams through complex technical decisions. It has no people-management responsibility stated as part of the role, though mentoring and technical leadership are expected, and some opportunities may include managing direct reports as the team grows. The engineer partners with Product and UX to shape agentic AI experiences and influences what gets built and how systems come together across teams. The work spans production-grade agentic systems, shared capabilities such as orchestration, planning, tool use, memory, retrieval and grounding, LLM infrastructure, evaluation, observability, and safety. Systems must be reliable, scalable, secure, explainable, cost-conscious, and appropriate for a regulated, customer-facing financial services environment.
Requirements
- More than 10 years of software engineering experience, including deep, hands-on experience delivering agentic or LLM-powered systems to production.
- 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 with workflow engines, asynchronous processing, queues, and streaming systems.
- Experience with languages including Python, Go, and TypeScript; APIs and RPC including REST and gRPC; AWS and/or GCP; Kubernetes; and event-driven distributed systems, including Kafka.
- Experience integrating commercial and open-source LLMs into agentic workflows.
- Experience with agent and orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or CrewAI, and judgment about when to use frameworks versus lighter-weight primitives.
- Model-level experience using PyTorch and the Hugging Face ecosystem, including embeddings, fine-tuning, or inference tooling; some exposure to TensorFlow.
- Strong schema, validation, and state-management practices using tools such as Pydantic and Zod.
- Emphasis on evaluation, observability, safety, and reliability when deploying autonomous AI in regulated, customer-facing environments.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building agentic systems in fintech or other regulated industries.
- 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 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 with Product and UX partners to shape agentic AI experiences and influence what gets built and how systems are assembled across teams.
Benefits
- Competitive base salaries
- Bonus incentives
- 6% company match on the 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 of paid parental leave for all parents, regardless of gender, 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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
