Vice President, Ads

American Express•New York, NY

1d•$219,000 - $338,250•Hybrid

About The Position

At American Express, our culture is built on a 175-year history of innovation, shared values and Leadership Behaviors, and an unwavering commitment to back our customers, communities, and colleagues. From delivering differentiated products to providing world-class customer service, we operate with a strong risk mindset, ensuring we continue to uphold our brand promise of trust, security, and service. As part of Team Amex, you'll experience this powerful backing with comprehensive support for your holistic well-being and many opportunities to learn new skills, develop as a leader, and grow your career. Here, your voice and ideas matter, your work makes an impact, and together, you will help us define the future of American Express. Here, your voice and ideas matter, your work makes an impact, and together, you will help us define the future of American Express. Joining Amex Tech means discovering and shaping your contribution to something big. Here, you can work alongside talented tech teams and build a unique career with the Powerful Backing of American Express. With a range of opportunities to work with the latest technologies, and a commitment to back the broader engineering community through open source, our mission is to power your success. Because Amex Tech is powered by our technology, our culture, and our colleagues. The U.S. Consumer Services and Membership Digital Experiences Technology (USCDT) team brings together foundational strategic technology capabilities in digital experience engineering (Mobile and Web), AI/ML, marketing technology, enterprise communications, travel and lifestyle, and automation, grounded in our data technology model that prioritizes data governance. It employs a ground-breaking focus with development responsibilities for customer-facing capabilities that deepen and expand digital engagement, as well as core technical capabilities that cut across business lines and customer segments. We are building the next generation of our advertising and commerce media platform, Amex Ads, to redefine how brands engage with Amex customers in a privacy-first and data-rich environment. How will you make an impact in this role? In this role you will lead the end-to-end technical architecture, development, and delivery of the advertising platform powering this business. You will shape how Amex’s unique data assets and digital properties come together to drive relevant, high-performance advertising experiences at scale. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who has built and scaled advertising or retail media technology systems at a global scale.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in software engineering, including 8+ years in senior technology leadership roles
Proven success building or scaling ad tech or retail media platforms (e.g., ad serving, targeting, RTB, audience management, attribution)
Expertise in large-scale distributed systems, real-time data pipelines, and stream processing frameworks
Deep understanding of ad serving architectures, event-based systems, machine learning integration, and campaign management technologies
Experience leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams (backend, data, ML, SRE, and platform)
Track record of hands-on technical leadership — setting architectural direction, reviewing design docs, and guiding technical execution
Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence executives and technical teams alike
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field; advanced degree preferred

Responsibilities

Technology Strategy & Architecture
Define the technical vision and architecture for the Amex Ads platform — spanning audience creation, targeting, delivery, optimization, and measurement
Build high-scale, low-latency data systems capable of powering billions of ad decisions daily across Amex’s ecosystem
Lead architectural design for privacy-first data processing, real-time decisioning, and event-stream analytics
Evaluate and integrate with external adtech systems (DSPs, SSPs, CDPs, measurement partners) with a focus on security, reliability, and data integrity
Engineering Leadership
Lead an engineering organization of software engineers, data engineers, and architects focused on ad tech innovation and scale
Establish engineering excellence through code quality, system observability, automated testing, and production reliability (SRE)
Champion platform performance, scalability, and latency optimization across the ad delivery stack
Mentor engineers and create a culture of innovation, ownership, and continuous improvement
Collaboration & Cross-Functional Leadership
Partner with Product, Data, and Business teams to translate business objectives into scalable technical capabilities
Engage with executive stakeholders to communicate technical strategy, trade-offs, and platform evolution

Benefits

Competitive base salaries
Bonus incentives
6%25 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, regardless of gender, offered for pregnancy, adoption or surrogacy
Free access to global on-site wellness centers staffed with nurses and doctors (depending on location)
Free and confidential counseling support through our Healthy Minds program
Career development and training opportunities