JOB DESCRIPTION

Our Technology organization is a strategic growth engine for the enterprise providing the secure, resilient, always-on digital foundation that powers global commerce. A central priority for American Express is the modernization of its Global Payment and Card Network-the critical backbone that connects consumer transactions with merchants, acquirers, and card issuers worldwide. This transformation is enabling new products, new markets, and expanded global reach. At the core of this ecosystem is the Payments Network Payment platform: a highly resilient, low-latency system that processes millions of transactions daily and thousands per second, operating 24x7, 365 days a year with uncompromising availability and performance.

Simultaneously, Amex Technology is advancing the next generation of AI-driven capabilities, embedding intelligent automation, agentic workflows, and data-driven decisioning into mission-critical platforms. We are building enterprise-grade AI frameworks, governance models, and shared infrastructure that enable responsible autonomy at scale, while meeting the highest standards for reliability, explainability, and regulatory compliance.

In close partnership with product, design, and business leaders, Technology delivers secure, explainable, reliable, and compliant AI solutions that reduce operational friction, strengthen decision-making, and redefine how customers interact, transact, and grow. Together, we are leveraging innovation, data, and responsible AI to shape the future of commerce while upholding the trust that has defined American Express for generations.

As a VP Principal Engineer, you will be a senior technical leader within Amex Technology. You will shape the long-term architectural vision for enterprise platforms spanning payments, Advanced AI-enabled systems, and cloud native distributed infrastructure. Your mandate is to define how complex, high-scale systems are designed, integrated, governed, and evolved to support both current and future business strategies.

You will operate at the intersection of executive strategy and deep technical execution. You will influence enterprise roadmaps, define architectural guardrails, and establish standards that drive consistency and excellence across portfolios. You serve as a trusted advisor and partner to engineering, product, and business executives-ensuring technology decisions balance innovation, risk management, cost efficiency, and long-term sustainability.

This is a highly strategic, deeply technical leadership role with broad architectural ownership and significant enterprise impact. This role carries broad architectural ownership and enterprise-level impact. While not primarily a people-management position, you lead through technical authority, mentorship, and influence-raising the engineering bar across the organization.

RESPONSIBILITIES

As a VP, Principal Engineer, you will set the technical vision and direction for enterprise initiatives, shaping architecture patterns, defining appropriate autonomy boundaries, and establishing scalable system design principles that enable responsible innovation.

• Set Enterprise Technical Direction: Drive architectural strategy for next-generation payment platforms and AI-enabled systems, defining patterns for distributed systems, autonomy boundaries, security, scalability, and resiliency.
• Modernize Mission-Critical Platforms: Lead the evolution of cloud-native, event-driven architectures that power high-volume, low-latency transaction processing globally.
• Advance AI at Enterprise Scale: Define and oversee shared AI capabilities, including agent frameworks and orchestration layers, retrieval and grounding (RAG) pipelines, model infrastructure and inference gateways, evaluation frameworks, observability, and safety controls for intelligent systems.
• Architect for Responsible Autonomy: Establish standards for explainability, safety, governance, and compliance across AI-enabled platforms operating in a highly regulated financial environment.
• You will ensure agentic capabilities are architected for security, explainability, reliability, and performance within a highly regulated environment.
• Lead High-Impact Design Decisions: Conduct and elevate critical design reviews, guiding teams through complex tradeoffs involving performance, resilience, autonomy, cost, and risk.
• Drive Cross-Enterprise Alignment: Partner across engineering, product, risk, and platform organizations to deliver large-scale, cross-cutting initiatives from concept through production and scale.
• Translate Innovation into Enterprise Value: Evaluate emerging technologies, models, and architectural patterns-converting cutting-edge advancements into secure, scalable, production-ready solutions.
• Elevate Engineering Excellence: Mentor senior engineers and architects, define best practices, and institutionalize standards that strengthen technical rigor across the enterprise.

Technical Environment

• You will operate in a modern, enterprise-scale engineering ecosystem emphasizing cloud-native platforms, distributed systems, and AI integration.
• You will demonstrate strong engineering fundamentals across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure with deep experience across the agentic AI stack, including planning, tool use, memory, and evaluation

Core engineering stack

• Languages: Java, Python, Go, TypeScript
• APIs and RPC: REST, gRPC (and in some areas tRPC)
• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes
• Distributed systems: event-driven architectures, including Kafka
• Orchestration Frameworks: LangGraph, LangChain, AirFlow, etc

Agentic AI and ML

• Integration of commercial and open-source LLMs into agentic workflows
• Agent and orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or CrewAI, with strong judgment about when to use frameworks versus building lighter-weight primitives
• Strong schema, validation, and state management practices using tools such as Pydantic (Python) and Zod (TypeScript)

Across all systems, we emphasize evaluation, observability, safety, resilience, and cost efficiency.

Outcomes for this role are:

• Advance the Next-Generation Payment Network: The evolution of a modern, cloud-native, distributed payment architecture-incorporating emerging technologies and AI-driven capabilities to enable new products, intelligent decisioning, and adaptive, real-time transaction processing at global scale.

• Embedding Responsible AI at Scale: Establishing enterprise standards and shared capabilities that enable secure, explainable, and compliant AI integration across platforms.

• Driving Innovation with Discipline: Balancing emerging technologies with operational excellence, ensuring high availability, resilience, and regulatory alignment.

• Elevating Enterprise Architecture: Delivering cohesive, future-ready designs that anticipate market opportunities and position American Express for long-term growth.

• Strengthening Technical Culture: Building alignment, trust, and architectural consistency across teams while raising the bar for engineering quality and execution.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 15+ years of progressive engineering experience in complex, large-scale, enterprise environments
• Proven enterprise architectural leadership influencing multiple portfolios
• Deep experience building high-availability, high-throughput distributed systems in cloud-native environments
• Demonstrated success integrating AI or autonomous capabilities into mission-critical systems, ideally within regulated industries
• Expertise in microservices, container orchestration (Kubernetes), and modern cloud infrastructure
• Strong foundation in performance-oriented engineering and scalable system design
• Experience with high-scale data platforms and NoSQL technologies
• Meaningful contributions to open-source or inner-source ecosystems
• Recognized for defining and institutionalizing engineering best practices at scale
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field required; advanced degree preferred

ABOUT US

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 our 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.

ABOUT THE TEAM

We back you with benefits that support your holistic well-being so you can be and deliver your best. This means caring for you and your loved ones' physical, financial, and mental health, as well as providing the flexibility you need to thrive personally and professionally:

• Competitive base salaries
• Bonus incentives
• 6% 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

For a full list of Team Amex benefits, visit out Colleague Benefits Site .

American Express is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status, age, or any other status protected by law. American Express will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in accordance with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the California Fair Chance Act, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance. For positions covered by federal and/or state banking regulations, American Express will comply with such regulations as it relates to the consideration of applicants with criminal convictions.

We back our colleagues with the support they need to thrive, professionally and personally. That's why we have Amex Flex, our enterprise working model that provides greater flexibility to colleagues while ensuring we preserve the important aspects of our unique in-person culture. Depending on role and business needs, colleagues will either work onsite, in a hybrid model (combination of in-office and virtual days) or fully virtually.

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The below represents the expected salary range for this job requisition. Ultimately, in determining your pay, we’ll consider your location, experience, and other job-related factors.