Job Description

The Modern Money Movement initiative is an exciting opportunity to solve complex challenges and to build a novel Platform that is going to power the next generation of Amex financial products. We are a team of entrepreneurial disruptors with a great FinTech Engineering culture at the forefront of innovation in the industry. We are building amazing GraphQL and APIs, intelligent payment routing decision engines, an ISO20022 framework, AI/ML driven data pipelines, and fluid integrators with Global Payment Infrastructure and the banking system. 

Our team is responsible for mission critical customer journeys, including “Pay your Amex Bill,” “Plan your Payment” and “Get a Loan.” Our goal is to decouple our assets, such as our ACH engine and bank validation, and make it easy for others in the company to build world class customer experiences. 

We are looking for a Director that is open-minded, willing to learn, and are passionate about building great software. We are influenced by The Twelve-Factor App principles, and we have picked modern ergonomic languages that maximize productivity and readability, i.e., modern JVM: Quarkus/Micronaut with Kotlin and lightweight Go command tools. Architecture is event driven microservices leveraging Kafka, and our polyglot-persistence includes Postgres and Cassandra. 

Responsibilities:   

Recruit and lead a group of talented engineers that will be tasked with inventing the future of the platform with a FinTech mindset 

Coach and develop talent and promote a culture of inclusion, collaboration and technical excellence 

Report to the VP Engineering and work closely with other engineering and product leaders to define strategy and drive a customer centric roadmap 

Responsible for solving challenging technical problems and producing elegant cloud native and event-driven solutions as an individual contributor 

Have a Site Reliability Engineering approach (alerts, paging, telemetry, incident management, threat-detection) 

Work on a fast-paced agile environment with competing initiatives and unplanned events that require rapid adjustment 

Productivity oriented and methodology driven. Define OKRs and continuous improvements in velocity & issue management 

Define software engineering practices and tooling: branching, code quality, build pipelines, contribution guides, monitoring strategy etc. 

Influence up/down/across and evangelize modern software engineering principles 

Think out of the box and bring an external payment expertise/perspective. 

Understand the evolving security, compliance and regulatory global financial environment. 

“Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the U.S. is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.”

Qualifications: 

Significant experience in developing cutting-edge technology in the Payments, Money Movement space 

Proven leadership experience of fast-paced and dynamic engineering teams 

University Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field or equivalent experience 

Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to cater to a diverse audience: executive stakeholder, customer, partner, engineering 

Ability to tell powerful stories and influence at all levels of a matrixed organization across varying functions 

Ability to quickly establish credibility with engineers 

Experience leading individual contributors and providing career direction, coaching and development plans 

Motivational personality. Capable of instilling accountability and achieving results 

Advanced understanding of software design patterns: object oriented, functional, reactive, data-intensive, scalability, availability principles 

Advanced proficiency in modern Java (8+): functional concepts, i.e. reactive streams, lambdas, concurrency. Alternative JVM languages: Kotlin, Clojure a plus 

Proven track record leading core engineering functions: code reviews, design proposals, code style/structure, contribution guidelines, release conventions, testing strategy 

Experience modeling and architecting complicated business domains and associated methodologies/paradigms: i.e. Domain Driven Design, Event Sourcing, CQRS 

Expertise in distributed architectural patterns: event driven microservices, distributed transactions: sagas, append-only logs, change data capture, idempotent consumer, eventual consistency 

Proven track record implementing minimalistic event driven microservices chassis (not just Spring), i.e. Quarkus/Vert.x, Micronaut, Javalin, Ktor or non-JVM: Javascript, Go 

Proven understanding of cloud native principles: service discovery, circuit breakers, observability, distributed tracing, configurability 

Extensive experience designing and building event-oriented stacks: Kafka, Zookeeper, Kafka Connect, Avro, Schema Registry, CloudEvents, ActiveMQ 

Expertise in Docker/Kubernetes and PaaS principles 

Expertise designing elegant and consumable APIs, full dominion of OpenAPI, gateway concepts, authentication/authorization OAuth, JWT 

Expertise in InfoSec practices: penetration testing, thread modeling, cryptography, network security 

Experience in Payment messaging schemes and related transformation, definition technologies, i.e. ISO 20022, NACHA, Swift and XSLT, EMF, JSON schema 

Experience leading individual contributors and providing career direction, coaching and development plans