Director - Data Engineering - Agentic AI

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.

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 Technology organization enables and accelerates the company’s growth strategies, delivering global capabilities and services in support of Amex’s customers and colleagues, while maintaining 24/7 servicing and availability to ensure an uninterrupted, high-quality customer experience. Technology provides the foundation for everything we do in the company while driving differentiation through building and leveraging innovative technology and data insights.

At American Express, AI is reshaping the future of commerce and redefining the experiences our commercial customers and card members expect. Within Amex Technology, we are building platforms, products, and governance that enable agentic AI systems to operate responsibly and at scale across the enterprise.

Our focus is on agentic AI development: designing intelligent, adaptive systems that can plan, reason, and act across complex workflows with appropriate levels of autonomy. These systems power autonomous workflows, decision support, and customer-facing experiences—while meeting the high standards for security, explainability, reliability, and compliance required in financial services.

We partner closely with product, design, and business teams to deliver agentic capabilities that reduce operational friction, improve decision-making, and transform how customers interact, transact, and grow.

The Role

As a Director of Data Engineering – Agentic AI, you will lead the strategy, architecture, and execution of agentic AI systems across Amex Technology. You will be responsible for building and leading high-performing engineering teams that define how agentic AI solutions are designed, built, and operated at scale across the enterprise.

This role combines deep technical leadership with people leadership. You will set technical direction, establish architectural standards, and ensure delivery of reliable, scalable agentic AI platforms—while also hiring, developing, and managing engineering talent. Your impact will come from shaping long-term strategy, cultivating strong engineering culture, and enabling teams to turn ambiguity into production-grade systems.

You will operate at the intersection of vision and execution: guiding system design, reviewing critical architectures, partnering on complex technical decisions, and ensuring engineering excellence across multiple teams. While you may engage in hands-on technical discussions, your primary focus will be organizational leadership, technical oversight, and execution at scale rather than individual contribution.

You will work closely with Product, UX, and enterprise stakeholders to shape the vision and roadmap for agentic AI experiences. Product teams own prioritization, but as a Director you will influence investment strategy, platform direction, and cross-team integration to ensure cohesive, enterprise-ready solutions.

What You’ll Do

• 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 (RAG) pipelines
  • LLM infrastructure, inference, and model gateways
  • Evaluation, observability, and safety tooling for autonomous systems
• 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.
• Demonstrate accountability while leading people with passion, enthusiasm, loyalty and integrity. Own and lead HR processes such as performance reviews, talent development, etc.
• Recruit top talent with technical skills, growth potential, design sensibility, and emotional intelligence.
• Lead teams in iterative product development using lean principles.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development through example and influence.

Technical Environment

We don’t hire to a narrow checklist, but candidates should be comfortable operating in a modern, enterprise-scale engineering environment with a strong emphasis on agentic AI.

Core engineering stack

• Languages: 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
• Model-level work using PyTorch and the Hugging Face ecosystem (embeddings, fine-tuning, inference tooling), with some exposure to TensorFlow
• Strong schema, validation, and state management practices using tools such as Pydantic (Python) and Zod (TypeScript)

Across all systems, we emphasize evaluation, observability, safety, and reliability, reflecting the responsibility of deploying autonomous AI in a regulated, customer-facing environment.

What We’re Looking For

• 10+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems + strong experience with LLM systems, agentic workflows or advanced ML infrastructure
• Strong experience leading and growing teams of fellow engineers through complex deliveries
• A history of taking projects through the entire software development lifecycle from inception to delivery as a technical leader
• Demonstrated experience coaching, mentoring, and developing technical professionals.
• Ability to lead engineering teams and negotiate or influence across organizational boundaries.
• 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.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and translating them into shipped, reliable autonomous systems.
• Ability to influence technical direction and align teams without formal authority.
• Experience in workflow engines, async processing, queues, and streaming systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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 is a plus
  

Salary Range: $144,250.00 to $256,250.00 annually + bonus + equity (if applicable) + benefits

The above 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.

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 our 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, but not limited to, 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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Depending on factors such as business unit requirements, the nature of the position, cost and applicable laws, American Express may provide visa sponsorship for certain positions.