Director - AI Engineering - Agentic AI

About the role

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.

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.
• 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.

Qualifications

• 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.