Staff AI Engineer - Enterprise Architecture
American Express3 days ago
Base Salary
$144k - $256k/yr
Responsibilities
- Drive technical direction for agentic AI initiatives, including architecture patterns, autonomy boundaries, and system design.
- Design, build, and operate production-grade agentic AI systems used across multiple products.
- Own shared agentic AI capabilities including agent frameworks, orchestration, planning, tool use, memory, retrieval and grounding, LLM infrastructure, inference, model gateways, evaluation, observability, and safety tooling.
- Lead technical design reviews and guide tradeoffs involving autonomy, safety, reliability, scalability, and cost.
- Partner across product, UX, and engineering teams to deliver cross-cutting agentic AI initiatives from concept through production.
- Evaluate emerging models, techniques, and agentic patterns and translate them into enterprise-ready improvements.
- Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development through technical leadership and influence.
Requirements
- At least 10 years of software engineering experience, including deep hands-on experience delivering agentic or LLM-powered systems to production.
- 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 with planning, tool use, memory, evaluation, and other components of the agentic AI stack.
- Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows.
- Ability to translate ambiguous problem spaces into reliable, autonomous systems and influence technical direction without formal authority.
- Experience with workflow engines, asynchronous processing, queues, and streaming systems.
- Preferred: experience in fintech or other regulated industries, founding-engineer or early technical leadership experience, customer-reliant autonomous systems, open-source AI or agentic framework contributions, and familiarity with fine-tuning, model optimization, and inference pipelines.
Benefits
- Competitive base salaries and bonus incentives.
- 6% company match on the retirement savings plan and free financial coaching.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits.
- Flexible hybrid, onsite, or virtual working arrangements depending on the role and business need.
- 20+ weeks of paid parental leave for all parents, including pregnancy, adoption, or surrogacy.
- Access to global onsite wellness centers and confidential counseling through the Healthy Minds program.
- Career development and training opportunities.
- Work arrangement follows the Amex Flex model and may be onsite, hybrid, or fully virtual based on role and business needs.
Tech Stack
Categories
About American Express
American Express builds a global payments network and issues consumer, small-business, and corporate cards, plus merchant acquiring and travel services. Revenue comes from card fees, interest and lending, discount/merchant fees, and network services. Founded in 1850 and headquartered in New York City, it operates the Amex acceptance network worldwide and offers co-branded cards and membership rewards across millions of cardmembers and merchants; ticker NYSE: AXP.