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. 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. 

American Express Global Card Network Platform authorizes and processes all of the company’s customer card transactions. The Card Network platform is the critical back bone for all of American Express card transactions, and is a near real time low latency system that is always available and highly resilient, processing transactions from around the world 24x7, 365 days a year. American Express is making strategic investments in new card network products and platforms to allow the company to meet its ambitious global growth agenda. 

How will you make an impact in this role? 

As our Director of Engineering, you will join our global technology team that has embarked on building a highly available and scalable distributed systems on the cloud to support the company's long-term strategy and vision. You will lead a team of engineers across new/emerging concepts in a way that inspires them to do their best work and continue to grow and develop within the company. Our leaders work with distributed teams in a highly dynamic environment collaborating with product and technology leaders, and engineers who are passionate about our journey to build and deliver technology-powered solutions that our customers love and that works for our business. 

Your primary responsibility is to lead the development of our next generation distributed platform, aligning resources and delivery with business growth and diversification, while significantly improving service quality and cost-effectiveness. We expect the individual to be innovative and energetic with strong communications and collaboration skills. 

Key Initiatives: 

Migrate partners to process real-time transaction through the Payment Network using Single Message rails 

Develop best-in-class delivery engine with optimal throughput and quality releases 

Maximize productivity of engineering teams with automation and increase predictability 

High Availability, Resiliency and Performance Engineering on Cloud 

 

Roles and Responsibilities: 

You will be responsible for building capabilities of a distributed transaction processing infrastructure and payment processing business logic by leveraging that platform. Leading and engaging teams that build/deploy high throughput systems within a fast paced, agile environment while understanding and handling competing priorities. 

Hands-on collaboration with business and technology leaders, stakeholders, product owners, Architects, and Engineers to define, develop, test and validate technical solutions to help drive customer-first product roadmap enabling business outcomes. Contribute to code review and analysis/design of business needs and user stories 

Attract, retain, and grow diverse top engineering talent, providing guidance, career development and mentorship to team members maintaining a culture that emphasizes quality, continuous improvement, retention of key colleagues, development, and high performance. 

You will constantly pursue and learn industry leading/innovative solutions. Build high awareness of open-source technologies and communities that enable high volume low latency systems. 

Lead a culture of innovation and experimentation, support full software development lifecycle that incorporates the best of technology approaches and delivery methodologies. 

Engage with developers in day-to-day design and coding activities to execute product and strategy roadmaps. Stepping into code where and if needed and be a hands-on leader 

Ensure on time product releases that are of high quality, enabling the core vision of next generation card processing systems. 

Promote a fun and high engagement culture, with a results orientated focus. Hire, mentor, motivate and retain the best talent. 

Collaborate with peer technology and product teams across different locations 

 

Qualifications 

You have Computer Science degree, or equivalent with at-least 10+ years of relevant work experience. 

Have built and delivered large scale enterprise systems/products and have extensive hands-on experience. Preferably delivered and supported products as Cloud hosted services. 

Experience building highly available and low latency distributed systems. Experience building systems as service-oriented architecture and/or micro-services architecture. 

Keen awareness of concerns in a massively distributed systems and effective solutions.

Experience in Linux cloud (Kubernetes) environment supporting applications built using language like Java, Go, Node.js and NoSQL databases like Couchbase, Cassandra, Redis. 

Experience attracting, hiring and retaining a diverse high-performing engineering talent. 

Have experience leading engineering teams and in agile methodologies, have enabled DevOps mindset, processes and tools

Ability to learn and deep dive into new technology and business domains, question status quo and think outside of the box. 

Excellent judgment and constant pursuit of higher standards, a passion to build and nurture high efficiency teams. 

Have excellent written and verbal communications skills. Create and deliver effective presentations to Senior Leadership. 

Ability to negotiate and influence stakeholders 

Knowledge of Payment Network Authorization, Acquiring & Issuing platforms and business processes is a plus 

 

Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the UK is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions. 

 

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 Support for financial-well-being and retirement Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits (depending on location) Flexible working model with hybrid, onsite or virtual arrangements depending on role and business need Generous paid parental leave policies (depending on your location) 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

Offer of employment with American Express is conditioned upon the successful completion of a background verification check, subject to applicable laws and regulations.