Staff Data Engineer — Agentic AI Architect

American Express; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

American Express is seeking a Staff Data Engineer – Agentic AI to shape the design and operation of agentic AI systems across the enterprise. This senior IC role focuses on architecture, production-grade delivery, and cross-team collaboration to advance AI-driven workflows with strong emphasis on safety and reliability.

You will collaborate with product and UX partners to translate complex AI concepts into scalable solutions, mentoring engineers and influencing technology choices while

Qualifications

• 10+ years building large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven ownership of cross-cutting agentic systems.
• Strong backend, APIs, data pipelines and cloud infra expertise.
• Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical direction for agentic AI initiatives, influencing architecture patterns, autonomy boundaries, and system design.
• Design, build, and operate production-grade agentic AI systems used across multiple products.
• Own and evolve shared agentic AI capabilities, including:
• Agent frameworks and orchestration layers
• Planning, tool use, and memory strategies
• Retrieval and grounding (RAG) pipelines
• LLM infrastructure, inference, and model gateways
• Evaluation, observability, and safety tooling for autonomous systems
• Lead technical design reviews and help teams navigate tradeoffs involving autonomy, safety, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Partner across teams to deliver complex, cross-cutting agentic AI initiatives from concept to production.
• Evaluate emerging models, techniques, and agentic patterns and translate them into practical, enterprise-ready improvements.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development through example and influence.

Skills

Distributed systems

LLM systems

Agentic AI workflows

Backend APIs

Cloud infrastructure

Kafka

PyTorch

LangGraph

LangChain

AirFlow

Pydantic

Zod

Hugging Face

Tools

LangGraph

LangChain

AirFlow

Pydantic

Zod

Kafka

PyTorch

Hugging Face

Job description

American Express is seeking a Staff Data Engineer – Agentic AI to shape the design and operation of agentic AI systems across the enterprise. This senior IC role focuses on architecture, production-grade delivery, and cross-team collaboration to advance AI-driven workflows with strong emphasis on safety and reliability.

You will collaborate with product and UX partners to translate complex AI concepts into scalable solutions, mentoring engineers and influencing technology choices while