Staff 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.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development through example and influence.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems + strong experience with LLM systems, agentic workflows or advanced ML infrastructure.
• 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.

Benefits

At American Express, we care for you and your loved ones' physical, financial, and mental health, as well as provide the flexibility you need to thrive personally and professionally. This includes:

• 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 and confidential counseling support through our Healthy Minds program
• Career development and training opportunities

Pay

Ultimately, in determining your pay, we’ll consider your location, experience, and other job-related factors.

Schedule

This role may be filled as either virtual or hybrid, depending on the selected candidate’s location and business needs. Candidates who live within commuting distance of a company office may be designated as hybrid and generally will be expected to work from the office three days per week. Candidates who do not live within commuting distance of a company office may be eligible for a virtual work arrangement, subject to company policy, business needs, and applicable law. Final work arrangement will be confirmed during the hiring process.