Staff Data Engineer

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. 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.

American Express is on an exciting Big Data Cloud transformation 'Next Gen Big Data' focused on providing best in class Data, Analytics and AI/ML experience to Enterprise users and platforms. This Engineering Director role will focus on delivering key platform capabilities around data observability, developer and usecase enablement tooling working closely with Product teams, Cloud Engineering, Info Security, and other Enterprise teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and implement scalable, distributed data frameworks and pipelines to process petabyte-scale datasets in both batch and streaming modes.
• Design and deliver cloud-native data processing solutions using Spark, Beam, Flink, Dataflow, and BigQuery on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Review platform migration use cases, assess architecture and design patterns, and provide strategic recommendations to ensure scalability, security, and enterprise alignment.
• Architect and optimize single-tenant and multi-tenant solutions, balancing cost, performance, and security across diverse workloads.
• Build automation and accelerator frameworks to standardize data transformation, migration, and validation across Lumi workloads.
• Engineer fault-tolerant, self-healing, and high-throughput systems optimized for concurrency, latency, and compute efficiency.
• Define robust data modeling, schema evolution, and partitioning strategies for performance, scalability, and maintainability.
• Develop developer-facing SDKs, reusable libraries, and APIs that simplify platform usage and promote consistency.
• Integrate observability, lineage, and data quality enforcement mechanisms into Lumi's end-to-end data lifecycle.
• Lead performance benchmarking, capacity planning, and technical reviews to ensure Lumi services meet stringent SLAs.
• Collaborate with Cloud, Security, and Platform teams to align with enterprise standards for reliability, resilience, and compliance.
• Mentor senior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Operate as a hands-on technical leader—balancing architecture direction with active code contribution.
• Champion engineering best practices, automation, and reusability across distributed teams.
• Communicate complex technical concepts effectively and influence senior stakeholders across teams.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, technical rigor, and innovation across global engineering teams.

Qualifications-

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, distributed systems, or big data platform development.
• Proven success in architecting and delivering large-scale, high-performance, cloud-native data systems on GCP or equivalent environments.
• Demonstrated ability to drive architecture and design decisions in complex, multi-stakeholder organizations.

Technical Expertise:

• Strong expertise in cloud architecture fundamentals (compute, network, storage, and security) ensuring high availability, visibility, and compliance.
• Proven experience leading large-scale on-prem to cloud migrations; defining strategies, standards, and best practices for secure, seamless transformations.
• Skilled in architecture reviews, balancing innovation with long-term sustainability.
• Deep hands-on experience with GCP and Big Data technologies — BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Dataproc, and IAM.
• Strong understanding of VPC design, interconnects, firewalls, and networking for secure, high-performance data pipelines.
• Proven ownership of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) frameworks using Terraform Enterprise and Cloud Deployment Manager; skilled in Docker and Kubernetes (GKE/OpenShift).
• Proficient with CI/CD and automation tools such as GitHub Enterprise, Jenkins, ArgoCD, or Cloud Build.
• Expert in Python, Scala, and Java with deep experience in Spark, Beam, Flink, and GCP Dataflow for scalable data processing.
• Strong knowledge of cost-performance trade-offs and designing multi-tenant architectures optimized for efficiency and reliability.
• Experienced in building APIs, orchestrators, and automated data migration frameworks with focus on performance and modularity.
• Expert in Cloud IAM, key management, and platform security with deep understanding of PCI-DSS, SOX, and GDPR compliance.
• Skilled in developing large-scale batch and streaming pipelines with strong grounding in data modeling, schema evolution, and metadata governance (Dataplex, Collibra, Apache Atlas, Informatica EDC).
• Proficient in observability frameworks (metrics, logging, tracing) using Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, ELK, Stackdriver, and Cloud Trail.
• Knowledgeable in ML modeling infrastructure — GPU/TPU, GKE, and MLOps integration for scalable machine learning platforms.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in BFSI or FinTech domains managing sensitive, high-volume data workloads.
• Knowledge of real-time analytics, event-driven systems, or streaming architectures for fraud, risk, and payments.
• Contributions to open-source projects, technical papers, or patents in data engineering or distributed computing.
• Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer or Cloud Architect certification (Great to have).

We back you with benefits that support your holistic well-being so you can be and deliver your best. This means caring for you and your loved ones' physical, financial, and mental health, as well as providing the flexibility you need to thrive personally and professionally:

• Competitive base salaries
• Bonus incentives
• Support for financial-well-being and retirement
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits (depending on location)
• Flexible working model with hybrid, onsite or virtual arrangements depending on role and business need
• Generous paid parental leave policies (depending on your location)
• 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

American Express is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status, age, or any other status protected by law.

Offer of employment with American Express is conditioned upon the successful completion of a background verification check, subject to applicable laws and regulations.