Sr AI Engineer I - Agentic- Travel & Lifestyle Services Technology

American Express; Phoenix (AZ); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

American Express's technology organization is seeking a Senior AI Engineer I – Agentic AI to turn complex, ambiguous problems into production-grade agentic systems that operate on real financial data and serve real customers.

You will shape solutions with product and design, build and ship production code, and own what you deliver after launch, covering customer-facing LLM-powered features and internal AI capabilities for other engineers.

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.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship LLM-powered features that change how customers manage finances.
• Build agentic AI systems that reason over context and take real actions.
• Architect production-grade RAG pipelines with strict correctness and safety.
• Contribute to shared AI infrastructure, including LLM services and tooling.
• Own production systems, including reliability, latency, and costs.
• Work closely with product and design partners to focus on customer outcomes.

Skills

LLMs/ML experience

Production systems

Backend APIs

Cloud infrastructure

Ownership & product mindset

Ambiguity tolerance

Tools

LLM tooling

Kubernetes

AWS/GCP

REST/gRPC

Kafka

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.

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.

The U.S. Consumer Services and Membership Digital Experiences Technology team (USCDT) brings together foundational strategic technology capabilities in digital experience engineering (Mobile and Web), marketing and advertising technology, enterprise communications, travel and lifestyle, and dining technology. 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.

The Travel & Lifestyle Services (TLS) product portfolio supports travel, fulfilment and concierge services across multiple channels 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We deliver at a rapid pace, driving high quality engineering outcomes to support thousands of customer services professionals and millions of card members worldwide.

The TLS Technology team delivers the technologies needed to power these experiences enjoyed by our card members. We are tasked with designing, building and integrating the appropriate technical, architectural and business solutions for all online/web products enterprise‑wide applications for TLS products within American Express.

Overall, this team is critical in ensuring timely delivery of new functions and capabilities, safeguarding technical excellence, ensuring the appropriate tradeoff between long‑term technical excellence versus time‑to‑market, etc..

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.

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.

Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.