Vice President, Engineering - Ads & Offers

American Express•New York, NY

8d•$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 as a leader and technologist. 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 shaping your contribution to something big. You’ll work alongside world-class engineering teams, leverage modern technologies, and help define the future of digital engagement at scale. The U.S. Consumer Services and Membership Digital Experiences Technology (USCDT) organization brings together strategic capabilities across digital experience engineering, AI/ML, marketing technology, enterprise communications, and data platforms. Grounded in a strong data governance model, the team builds customer-facing and foundational platforms that power engagement across Amex products and services. We are building the next generation of our advertising and commerce ecosystem—spanning Amex Ads and Amex Offers—to redefine how brands connect with customers through privacy-first, data-driven, and highly personalized experiences. How will you make an impact in this role? This role will lead the end-to-end technology strategy, architecture, and execution for both the advertising platform and the offers platform, shaping a unified commerce media ecosystem that delivers relevant, real-time value to Card Members and merchants at global scale. This is a hands-on senior technical leadership role for a leader who has built and scaled Adtech, retail media, or large-scale personalization platforms, and can operate at the intersection of data, decisioning, and customer experience.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in software engineering, with 8+ years in senior technology leadership roles
Proven success building or scaling adtech, retail media, or large-scale personalization platforms (e.g., ad serving, targeting, offers, audience management, attribution)
Deep expertise in distributed systems, real-time data pipelines, and stream processing frameworks
Strong understanding of ad serving architectures, event-driven systems, and ML integration
Experience with cloud platforms, microservices, APIs, and modern data ecosystems (SQL/NoSQL, streaming)
Track record of hands-on technical leadership, including architecture definition and guiding execution
Experience leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams across backend, data, ML, and platform engineering
Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence both executive and technical audiences
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field; advanced degree preferred

Responsibilities

Technology Strategy & Architecture
Define and drive the technical vision for a unified Ads and Offers platform, spanning audience creation, targeting, decisioning, delivery, optimization, and measurement
Architect high-scale, low-latency distributed systems capable of powering billions of ad and offer decisions across Amex’s ecosystem
Lead the design of real-time decisioning systems, event-driven architectures, and large-scale data processing pipelines
Ensure privacy-first data usage, governance, and secure data collaboration across internal and external ecosystems
Evaluate and integrate with external adtech platforms (e.g., DSPs, SSPs, CDPs, measurement partners)
Drive adoption of cloud-native architectures, microservices, and modern streaming technologies
Platform & System Delivery
Deliver highly available, resilient platforms that power personalized, real-time ads and offers for millions of customers and merchants globally
Lead complex, cross-functional initiatives involving event-stream processing, ML-driven decisioning, and partner integrations
Balance speed, innovation, and long-term sustainability, actively managing technical debt and platform evolution
Establish strong operational excellence practices including observability, SLAs, incident management, and SRE principles
Engineering Leadership
Lead and scale a high-performing organization of software engineers, data engineers, and architects
Foster a culture of ownership, innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement
Set a high bar for engineering excellence across code quality, testing, performance, and reliability
Mentor and develop senior leaders and technologists, building a strong leadership pipeline
Drive performance, scalability, and latency optimization across ad delivery and offer decisioning systems
Collaboration & Cross-Functional Leadership
Partner with Product, Data, Marketing, and Business teams to translate strategy into scalable technical platforms
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