Staff-Software Engineer
American Express23 hours ago
Westminster, United KingdomStaff+
Responsibilities
- Define and execute the technical vision and roadmap for enterprise platform engineering capabilities.
- Design and build scalable, resilient, secure, highly available platform services used by hundreds of engineering teams.
- Lead the architecture and implementation of developer platforms, CI/CD systems, infrastructure automation, and cloud-native services.
- Drive platform standardization, reusable engineering patterns, self-service capabilities, and developer productivity improvements.
- Establish best practices for software architecture, reliability, observability, security, and operational excellence.
- Lead cross-organizational technical initiatives and provide leadership during architecture reviews, design discussions, and critical production incidents.
- Mentor senior engineers and foster technical excellence across engineering communities.
- Partner with Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Enterprise Architecture teams.
- Drive software development lifecycle automation and adoption of cloud-native technologies, Infrastructure as Code, container platforms, and modern deployment strategies.
- Influence technology direction through RFCs, design documents, technical standards, and engineering governance.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; a master’s degree is preferred.
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience designing distributed systems.
- Experience leading large-scale platform engineering or infrastructure engineering initiatives.
- Deep expertise in one or more of Java, Go, Python, or Kotlin.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, and API design.
- Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant cloud-native applications.
- Expertise with Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Experience building CI/CD platforms and software delivery pipelines.
- Strong understanding of Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar technologies.
- Experience implementing observability with metrics, logging, tracing, and monitoring platforms.
- Knowledge of authentication, authorization, secrets management, and enterprise security practices.
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence executive and engineering leadership.
- Preferred qualifications include Internal Developer Platform experience, Backstage or similar developer portal experience, service mesh experience with technologies such as Istio or Linkerd, DevSecOps-aligned platform engineering, FinOps, cloud governance, large-scale Kubernetes operations, open-source contributions, and experience in regulated industries.
Benefits
- Competitive base salaries and bonus incentives.
- Support for financial well-being and retirement.
- Medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits depending on location.
- Flexible hybrid, onsite, or virtual working arrangements depending on the role and business need.
- Generous paid parental leave depending on location.
- Access to global onsite wellness centers and confidential counseling through the Healthy Minds program.
- Career development and training opportunities.
Tech Stack
AWSAzureDatadogDockerGitHub ActionsGoGoogle Cloud PlatformGrafanagRPCHelmIstioJavaJenkinsKotlinKubernetesPrometheusPythonSplunkTerraformTypeScript
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.