Director Software Engineering: Global Merchant Services Technologies – Tax and Payments

About the position 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. Why American Express? The company is making strategic investments in new merchant products and platforms to allow the company to meet its high-reaching global growth agenda. Global Merchant Services Technology is on an exciting journey to redefine the merchant payment experience. Our Merchant platform is a distributed near real time low latency system that is always available and highly resilient, processing transactions from around the world 24x7, 365 days a year. Talk to our people and you’ll find out what we’re really all about. Open, creative, risk-taking, collaborative, and innovative are just some of the expressions you will hear. It is our people that makes American Express an outstanding place to work. If you like to challenge the status quo and desire to use best in class technology, it's time to join the GMST organization which strives for continuous innovation. Are you a change agent with a deep engineering passion to build outstanding products for merchants? If so, we are looking for an enthusiastic, driven, and forward-thinking Engineering Director to join us on our mission.

Responsibilities

• Collaboration with key business partners to help drive the strategic vision, technical design, development, and delivery of strategic roadmaps and prioritized initiatives across a portfolio of software products / Technology Platforms to ensure they met the evolving needs of American Express and its merchants.
• Driving key architectural decisions and design considerations to ensure system scalability and resiliency for transformation and modernization initiatives.
• Accountability for delivery, quality, and operational metrics of a portfolio, including system performance, platform availability, operational efficiency, risk management, information security, data management as well as cost efficiency.
• Leading a team of successful, forward-thinking, creative, multi-functional Engineers (Technical Project Managers, Engineers, and Architects) to enable delivery.
• Empower teams to automate demand driven scalable application deployments in test or production environments.
• Provide technical leadership and coaching to engineers on coding, quality and testing; developing skills and ensuring an environment of continuous engineering improvement through mentoring, feedback, and metrics.
• Building a culture of GEN AI first for innovation, development across teams, delivering dynamic software solutions, and inspiring change.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or related field required, advanced degree preferred.
• 8+ years demonstrated senior technical leadership experience leading highly sophisticated, ambitious, multi-functional technology software teams.
• Languages: Java, Vert.x
• APIs and RPC: REST, gRPC
• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes
• Distributed systems: Event-driven architectures, including Kafka
• 12+ years of hands-on engineering and/or software development (of Java, Vert.x, Spring, REST, PostgreSQL, One data and distributed applications design).
• 5+ years of large-scale capabilities product engineering experience with modern tools and delivery methods in a sophisticated environment (i.e., GEN AI, DevOps, CD/CI, Agile, etc.).
• 5+ years proven experience driving B2B and B2C platform capabilities through complex partner ecosystems, including external merchants, fintechs, and third-party service providers, with strong focus on integration, scalability, partner experience, security and shared outcomes.
• Experience leading large scale Agile portfolio delivery and solution integration.
• Technical expertise related to the core components of the tech stack, as well as delivery optimization techniques in a ‘total dev’ continuous delivery environment.
• Knowledge of overall Merchant Ecosystems – Pricing, Taxes, and Payments platforms preferred.
• Ability to understand the overall picture of a product roadmap (1 – 3 years) and experienced in building real time/batch distributed applications in cloud Architecture, In Memory computing systems and event driven architecture.
• Deep functional knowledge of AXP organization and business processes to effectively influence software solutions.
• Ability to lead multiple priorities and rapidly guide the organization through change moments.
• Demonstrate thought leadership to overcome challenges and inspire change.
• Understand how effectively deliver innovative products that link customer needs and business drivers together.
• Be a hands-on technologist that can do effective code reviews and can also code, understands what a pull request means, and understands code etiquette.
• Possess extraordinary influential and collaboration skills; ability to drive consensus and tangible outcomes, demonstrated by breaking down silos and fostering cross communication process.
• Excellent leadership skills, with the ability to impact all levels across functions, conduct intelligent business and technology conversations with SVP and/or EVP level business leaders.
• Able to lead with an external view, adopt industry change to drive effectiveness into engineering and delivery processes, building bold solutions.
• Experience in building high quality and efficient Engineering teams with a strong engineering approach.
• Attract, retain, and develop the best engineering talent in the market; mentor, and cultivate technology leaders within the team.
• Able to define precise, well-understood objectives and key results for the department, teams, and individuals.

Benefits

• Competitive base salaries
• Bonus incentives
• 6%25 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

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