Director Software Engineering

At American Express, our culture is built on a 175-year history of innovation, shared 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, youll 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.

Were looking for a Director, Software Engineering to lead the delivery of general servicing platforms supporting multiple global markets. In addition, the role offers the opportunity to collaborate closely with peers and senior leaders to help shape the future technical direction and engineering culture of a large, fast-paced organization committed to modern software development practices and building high-performing teams. This leader will bring an exceptional blend of strong people leadership and deep engineering expertise.

Key Responsibilities:

• Work with a team of highly talented engineers to build and deliver the roadmap.
• Lead, mentor, and grow multiple engineering teams focused on building high-scale, high-performance applications.
• Drive a culture of continuous learning, improvement, and evolving ways of working to strengthen engineering capabilities, platforms, and team growth.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across Product, Design, Business, and Technology to drive change required for product execution.
• Establish strong working relationships with Product Owners and technical teams across the organization.
• Hire, retain, and mentor engineers while promoting strong engineering culture and best practices.
• Conduct performance assessments, provide feedback, and maintain a consistent feedback loop with engineering teams.
• Communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences be a compelling and influential storyteller.
• Drive roadmap execution and strategic direction within your area of responsibility.
• Use engineering metrics to drive quality, predictability, and continuous improvement.
• Ensure alignment of architecture, standards, tools, and delivery methods across engineering and architecture teams.
• Provide thought leadership around engineering best practices and emerging technology trends.
• Act as a change agent, challenging the status quo and driving improvements to how teams build and deliver software.

Qualifications:

• Bachelors degree in computer science, Engineering, or related technical field.
• 10+ years of experience building customer-facing software products at scale.
• Proven experience as a people leader leading multiple team.
• Hands-on experience building customer-facing web applications using modern web frameworks and technologies, including React, Redux, Flux, Angular, Node.js, GraphQL, REST APIs, Java and cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS.

• Experience with or working knowledge of Pega platform capabilities is considered an advantage.

• Proven success engineering and deploying large-scale web products in an agile product development environment.

Technical Expertise:

• Strong hands-on proficiency with JavaScript, Java, and modern web frameworks (e.g., React, Angular, Vue).
• Experience designing and implementing scalable APIs consumed by web and mobile clients.
• Deep understanding of high-availability, high-performance, and scalable web architectures.
• Ability to dive into technical details, make informed trade-offs, and guide architectural decisions.

• Demonstrated technical competencies including:

  • Web architecture & system design
  • Modern JavaScript frameworks
  • Microservices and API gateway patterns
  • Observability, data orchestration, and backend performance tuning
  • CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, etc.)
  • Cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
  • Automation frameworks and testing strategies (unit, integration, E2E)

  • Performance and reliability engineering

Leadership Skills:

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, design, and business teams.
• Strong ability to influence, align stakeholders, and drive clarity in complex delivery environments.
• Ability to build strong working relationship with product, business, design and technical teams across various organization.
• Demonstrated experience coaching, mentoring, and developing technical professionals
• Ability to lead engineering teams and negotiate or influence across organizational boundaries.
• Proven ability to inspire and motivate engineers at all levels.
• Ability to shape solutions that meet broader portfolio needs.
• Demonstrated ability to quickly learn, adopt, and champion new technologies.

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

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.

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