Staff AI Engineer - Enterprise Architecture

About the position 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. Responsibilities • 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. • Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development through example and influence. Requirements • 10+ years of software engineering experience, including deep, hands-on experience delivering agentic or LLM-powered systems to production • 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 Nice-to-haves • 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 Benefits • 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