Staff Engineer

ZipRecruiter; Burgess Hill; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company is seeking a hands-on senior Infrastructure Developer to enhance their global infrastructure services. This role involves optimizing technology strategy, mentoring junior engineers, and ensuring high levels of product availability. Candidates should have extensive experience in technology strategy and cloud applications, with strong leadership and communication skills.

Benefits

Competitive salaries and bonuses

Retirement and financial well-being support

Comprehensive medical benefits

Flexible working arrangements

Paid parental leave

Access to wellness centers and counseling services

Career development opportunities

Qualifications

• At least 10 years of experience with Technology strategy and large-scale program delivery.
• Strong technical background as an Infrastructure Developer.

Responsibilities

• Act as 'Developer Zero' to enhance infrastructure services.
• Mentor junior engineers and improve engineering quality.

Skills

Leadership

Stakeholder Management

Communication

Mentoring

Negotiation

Tools

GitHub

Kubernetes

Docker

VMware

OpenShift

Job description

Job Description

This job is with American Express, an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the + business community. Please do not contact the recruiter directly.

You Lead the Way. We’ve Got Your Back.

With the right backing, people and businesses have the power to progress in incredible ways. When you join Team Amex, you become part of a global and diverse community of colleagues with an unwavering commitment to back our customers, communities and each other. Here, you’ll learn and grow as we help you create a career journey that’s unique and meaningful to you with benefits, programs, and flexibility that support you personally and professionally.

At American Express, you’ll be recognized for your contributions, leadership, and impact—every colleague has the opportunity to share in the company’s success. Together, we’ll win as a team, striving to uphold our company values and powerful backing promise to provide the world’s best customer experience every day. And we’ll do it with the utmost integrity, and in an environment where everyone is seen, heard and feels like they belong.

Join Team Amex and let's lead the way together.

Global Infrastructure

The Global Infrastructure (GI) organization is a large, globally dispersed and diverse team. Its mission is dedicated to delighting our customers through an intuitive and modern self-service infrastructure that allows for secure, stable and scalable platforms with appropriate efficiency and innovation. GI is looking to help raise its bar for technical excellence and so this role will be dedicated to ensuring consistency and enterprise-wide collaboration on how we build and modernize technology, focused within the Infrastructure tower. This role will seek to cultivate and foster technical innovation, strategy, as part of the ability to deliver great experiences to all American Express colleagues.

In this role, you will report to our GI Head Engineer to act as “Developer Zero” – a hands-on senior Infrastructure Developer who consumes our client facing APIs, builds and manipulates infrastructure and deploys test applications on top of that infrastructure - just as our AppDev partners do. The role will in one direction provide direct feedback to the GI Engineers on areas for optimization and improvement on behalf of our clients, and in the other direction, provide guidance to our clients on how best to consume our GI product offerings. As “Developer Zero”, you will be essential in helping to uplift our enterprise-wide infrastructure services to ensure high levels of product availability for the customers and partners of American Express. This role is critical in delivery of functions to service the full stack of Amex enterprise solutions. Some of the problems we'll work on include:

• Testing new GI software components and APIs. Partnering with the GI Engineers to improve and optimize the developer experience for Amex applications running on our infrastructure.
• Building and operating synthetic applications that can be used to stress test our infrastructure from multiple dimensions (resiliency, security, performance etc.)
• Partnering with our Engineering teams to integrate Infrastructure services and platforms with our CI/CD platforms – improving our internal SDLC process, automated test cases and delivering fast time to value.
• Working to ensure reliability of compute and data partitioned across geographically distributed data centers – both in and out of the public cloud.
• Directly contribute to the design and coding of our software systems, serving as a role model for how great software is built at Amex.
• Helping to design and construct systems that are secure, reliable, scalable, and extensible
• Help drive sound technical decisions utilizing the advice of teammates, and contribute to technical conversations with other engineering teams
• Mentor junior team members across the organization and assist with projects that develop their skills

In this role you will:

• Work closely with the GI Head Engineer, EVP of Global Infrastructure and other senior engineers across the organization to find opportunities to improve engineering quality across American Express – both from an infrastructure perspective and from an AppDev perspective.
• Contribute to the Foundational Technology pillar of the Tech Strategy.
• Drive architectural design and engineering best practices throughout the GI organization.
• Instill accountability across GI for building solutions in alignment with Technology policies, standards, and development best practices.

Minimum Qualifications

• At least 10 years of experience with Technology strategy and large-scale program delivery.
• Strong and diverse technical background – ideally an Infrastructure Developer.
• You have contributed to the design and build of cloud applications written in Java or Go.
• You have done “DevOps” work, such as building CI/CD pipelines or setting up cloud hosting environments.
• Extensive experience in infrastructure products, including network, compute, storage, database, midrange, mainframe, observability with a focus on public & private cloud.
• You have experience mentoring junior engineers to help them succeed and grow.
• You build effective work relationships, give and receive constructive feedback, and are trusted by colleagues at all levels.
• You can evaluate platform silos from all perspectives and prioritize enterprise-wide thinking.
• Experience implementing SDLC in controlled or regulated environments.
• Strong influencing and negotiation skills.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills, including at senior levels.
• Exceptional written, interpersonal, and presentation communication skills.
• Experience working in a matrixed organization and influencing across teams.
• Demonstrated leadership in working with cross-functional, geographically dispersed teams on complex projects.
• Supportive and positive attitude towards a culture of respect, support, goal orientation, and diversity.

Technologies used at Amex include:

• Infrastructure components like VMware, IP networks, SDN, SAN/NAS fabrics, and OpenShift. Public cloud experience is crucial.
• Primary server languages are Go and Java.
• Code is stored in GitHub Enterprise and deployed via GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines.
• Code runs in Kubernetes-managed Docker containers in private and public clouds.
• Other key technologies include GraphQL, gRPC, Kafka, Postgres, Couchbase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Redis, OpenTracing, Jaeger, Prometheus, and Grafana.

American Express is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions without regard to protected statuses and other legally protected categories.

We support our colleagues with benefits that promote holistic well-being, including physical, financial, and mental health support, such as:

• Competitive salaries and bonuses
• Retirement and financial well-being support
• Comprehensive medical benefits
• Flexible working arrangements
• Paid parental leave (location-dependent)
• Access to wellness centers and counseling services
• Career development opportunities

Offer of employment is conditioned upon successful background verification, subject to applicable laws.

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