Vice President, Engineering - Ads & Offers

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.

Key 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

Qualifications:
• 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

What makes this role unique:
• Opportunity to build a unified Ads + Offers (commerce media) platform, not just a single product
• Direct impact on how Amex leverages its unique data assets in a privacy-safe way
• Leadership across both monetization (Ads) and customer value (Offers)—a rare combination
• Platform scale spanning millions of users, merchants, and billions of decisions

Salary Range: $219,000.00 to $338,250.00 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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Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the U.S is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions