Sr AI Engineer I - Agentic AI

American Express; Phoenix (AZ); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

American Express Tech seeks a Senior AI Engineer I – Agentic AI to lead the design and delivery of production‑grade, agentic AI features in fintech contexts. You will work with product and design, translate ambiguous problems into shipped capabilities, and own end‑to‑end delivery from code to customer impact.

You will build with LLM tooling, ensure security and compliance, and influence architecture across backend services, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure, driving reliable, scalable

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering with ML
• Shipped AI-powered or agentic systems
• Strong fundamentals in backend, data pipelines, and cloud
• Experience with LLM tooling and agentic patterns
• Fluency in AI-assisted and agentic development workflows

Responsibilities

• Design and ship LLM-powered features
• Build agentic AI systems that reason over context
• Architect production-grade RAG pipelines over sensitive data
• Contribute to AI infrastructure, tools, and evaluation
• Own production systems reliability, latency, and cost
• Collaborate with product and design for customer outcomes

Skills

LLM experience

Agentic AI systems

Backend systems

Cloud infrastructure

Product mindset

Ownership

Ambiguity tolerance

Tools

React

TypeScript

CircleCI

iOS/Swift

Android

Job description

Job Description

Joining Amex Tech means discovering and shaping your contribution to something big. Here, you can work alongside talented tech teams and build a unique career with the Powerful Backing of American Express. With a range of opportunities to work with the latest technologies, and a commitment to back the broader engineering community through open source, our mission is to power your success. Because Amex Tech is powered by our technology, our culture, and our colleagues.

Job Description

Joining Amex Tech means discovering and shaping your contribution to something big. Here, you can work alongside talented tech teams and build a unique career with the Powerful Backing of American Express. With a range of opportunities to work with the latest technologies, and a commitment to back the broader engineering community through open source, our mission is to power your success. Because Amex Tech is powered by our technology, our culture, and our colleagues.
The Technology organization enables and accelerates the company’s growth strategies, delivering global capabilities and services in support of Amex’s customers and colleagues, while maintaining 24/7 servicing and availability to ensure an uninterrupted, high-quality customer experience. Technology provides the foundation for everything we do in the company while driving differentiation through building and leveraging innovative technology and data insights.
At American Express, AI is reshaping the future of commerce and redefining the experiences our commercial customers and card members expect. Within Amex Technology, we are building platforms, products, and governance that enable agentic AI systems to operate responsibly and at scale across the enterprise.
Our focus is on agentic AI development: designing intelligent, adaptive systems that can plan, reason, and act across complex workflows with appropriate levels of autonomy. These systems power autonomous workflows, decision support, and customer-facing experiences—while meeting the high standards for security, explainability, reliability, and compliance required in financial services.
We partner closely with product, design, and business teams to deliver agentic capabilities that reduce operational friction, improve decision-making, and transform how customers interact, transact, and grow.
The U.S. Consumer and Digital Technology (USCDT) Team brings together foundational strategic technology capabilities in digital experience engineering (Mobile and Web), AI/ML, marketing technology, enterprise communications, travel and lifestyle, and automation, grounded in our data technology model that prioritizes data governance. It employs a ground‑breaking focus with development responsibilities for customer‑facing capabilities that deepen and expand digital engagement, as well as core technical capabilities that cut across business lines and customer segments.
AmericanExpress.com is a critical digital channel for customers to enroll in American Express products, take advantage of the benefits of membership, stay in touch with the company and self‑service through a multitude of products and applications.
You’ll be part of the Mobile Engineering team whose mission is to be essential in our customers’ digital lives by providing value, convenience, and delight wherever they are. You will be responsible for leading a team of mobile engineers building mobile applications that will be used by tens of millions of American Express Customers around the world.
As a Senior AI Engineer I – Agentic AI, you will be a core builder responsible for turning complex, ambiguous problems into production‑grade agentic systems that operate on real financial data, serve real customers, and meet real regulatory requirements.
You will work end to end: shaping solutions with product and design, building and shipping production code, and owning what you deliver after launch. The scope of this role spans customer‑facing LLM‑powered features, agentic systems that automate financial workflows, and internal AI capabilities that enable other engineers to build with AI safely and efficiently.
This is not a research‑only role. We are looking for engineers who are comfortable operating with autonomy, exercising sound judgment, and pushing the technical envelope within the realities of a regulated financial environment.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship LLM-powered and agentic product features that change how customers manage their finances.
• Build agentic AI systems that reason over context, invoke tools, take real actions, and recover gracefully from failure.
• Architect and implement production-grade RAG pipelines over sensitive financial data, with strict requirements for correctness, auditability, and safety.
• Contribute to shared AI infrastructure, including LLM services, agent orchestration frameworks, and evaluation and monitoring tooling, that scales agentic development across Amex Technology.
• Own the systems you build in production, including reliability, latency, cost, and failure modes.
• Work closely with product and design partners; engineers in this role are expected to think in terms of customer outcomes, not just technical execution.

Technical Environment

We don’t hire to a narrow checklist, but candidates should be comfortable operating in a modern, enterprise-scale environment with a strong emphasis on agentic AI.

Core engineering stack

• Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript
• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes
• APIs and services: REST, gRPC
• Distributed systems: event-driven architectures, including Kafka

Agentic AI and ML

• Commercial and open-source LLMs integrated into agentic workflows
• Tooling for agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, vector storage, and evaluation
• Strong schema, validation, and state management practices

AI-assisted development

• Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows for design, implementation, testing, debugging, and refactoring
• Thoughtful use of these tools while maintaining production-quality engineering standards All systems are built to meet high standards for reliability, security, and auditability, reflecting the responsibility of deploying autonomous AI in a financial services environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful production experience with LLMs or applied ML systems.
• A track record of shipping AI-powered or agentic systems that real users depend on.
• Strong engineering fundamentals across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Hands‑on experience with modern LLM tooling and agentic patterns and architectures.
• Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows.
• Strong sense of ownership and sound technical judgment.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and turning it into shipped reliable product.
• A strong product mindset and customer orientation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building agentic systems in fintech or other regulated industries.
• Experience as a founding engineer or early technical contributor in high-growth environments.
• Demonstrated ability to ship technically complex systems in regulated contexts that customers actively rely on.
• Meaningful open-source contributions, particularly in AI or developer tooling.
• Experience in modern application development technologies such as React, Kotlin, TypeScript, CircleCI, iOS/Swift, and Android.

Depending on factors such as business unit requirements, the nature of the position, cost and applicable laws, American Express may provide visa sponsorship for certain positions.