Vice President, Digital Payments Engineering (Wallets & Agentic, eCommerce Experiences)

About the role

We’re looking for an experienced engineering leader to lead the Wallets, eCommerce and Agentic Commerce platform, used by tens of millions of cardholders worldwide. You should be technically hands-on, a strong communicator, creative, and enjoy solving tough problems. You’ll translate ambiguous business needs into technical requirements and architecture, convey complex challenges to diverse stakeholders, and influence both internal and external partners. You’ll be part of the Digital Payments and Labs Engineering team, shaping new experiences at the intersection of payments, identity, and AI, with the opportunity to impact agentic commerce at American Express and across the industry.

This role operates in a fast-paced, agile environment with the stability of a Fortune 100 company, offering the chance to collaborate with leading technology companies and premier payments industry bodies. You’ll drive revenue growth and operational savings while setting standards for digital payment experiences.

Responsibilities

• Perform hands-on architecture, design, and drive development of elegant, efficient, secure, and scalable solutions.
• Mentor and lead scrum teams, working closely with product to deliver solutions.
• Actively participate in solution conversations and influence leading tech companies and industry standards (e.g., EMVCo, FIDO).
• Engage in design reviews to ensure consistency and alignment with company goals.
• Drive consistent development practices across tools and common components, embracing agentic development tools.
• Develop deep understanding of current and potential integrations with other systems and platforms.
• Identify opportunities to adopt new technologies to solve existing needs and improve productivity.
• Foster collaboration across multiple teams, prioritizing the company’s best interests.
• Lead adoption of AI development tools for your area.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering and 15+ years of equivalent experience in related disciplines.
• Proven record of building distributed applications.
• Demonstrated ability to solution and design with product and third parties.
• Ability to work collaboratively and influence outcomes across functional areas.
• Experience mentoring developers through code reviews and disseminating knowledge.
• Experience building scalable, low-latency APIs in high-performing, iterative development teams.
• Thorough understanding of modern tech stacks, API design, multi-threaded programming, data structures, networking, SQL, and NoSQL databases.
• Self-motivated and able to thrive in a just-in-time environment.
• Strong interpersonal and organizational skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Understanding of lean principles and efficient software development practices.
• Experience with payments technology and payment cryptography.
• Knowledge of iOS or Android development.
• Publication of blogs or participation in industry forums.

Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the U.S. is required; the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for this position.

Benefits

• Competitive base salaries and bonus incentives.
• 6% company match on retirement savings plan.
• Free financial coaching and well-being support.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits.
• Flexible working model (hybrid, onsite, or virtual depending on role).
• 20+ weeks paid parental leave for all parents (pregnancy, adoption, or surrogacy).
• Free access to global on-site wellness centers (location-dependent).
• Free and confidential counseling support through the Healthy Minds program.
• Career development and training opportunities.