Staff Software Engineer - Travel Platform Integrations

American Express; Phoenix (AZ); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

American Express Travel & Lifestyle Technology seeks a Staff Software Engineer to own and lead critical external travel platform integrations, partnering with vendor engineering leadership and internal platform teams to define integration strategy and standards.

You will drive architecture, reliability, and long-term technical leverage across multiple vendors, mentor engineers, and influence product roadmaps while ensuring data quality, security, and performance.

Qualifications

• 10+ years designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Ownership of mission-critical third-party or SaaS integrations.
• Expertise in API design, versioning, and integration patterns.
• Knowledge of fault tolerance, latency, and consistency models.
• Experience with resilience: retries, circuit breakers, graceful degradation.
• Experience with contract testing, schema governance, pre-production validation.
• Strong data engineering fundamentals and data lineage.
• Security architecture for external integrations.
• Translate technical risk into business impact.

Responsibilities

• Act as the single technical owner for all critical third-party travel platforms and providers.
• Define and maintain integration architecture, standards, and patterns for reliability and scalability.
• Collaborate with vendor engineers, including CTOs, on technical direction.
• Drive API design, performance, reliability, and security posture with vendors.
• Influence vendor product roadmaps and selection decisions.
• Establish API contract governance and automated testing to prevent breaking changes.
• Partner with SRE to manage systemic integration risks without owning day-to-day support.
• Drive resilience practices and multi-vendor fallback strategies.
• Define data quality and lineage expectations for third-party data flows.
• Support contract negotiations with technical acceptance criteria and SLAs.
• Collaborate with enterprise architecture to align with strategy.
• Mentor engineers on integration design and distributed systems tradeoffs.
• Develop POCs and rapid prototypes with third-party partners.

Skills

API design

Distributed systems

Reliability engineering

Technical leadership

Vendor integrations

Observability

Security architecture

Tools

AWS

Job description

American Express Travel & Lifestyle Technology seeks a Staff Software Engineer to own and lead critical external travel platform integrations, partnering with vendor engineering leadership and internal platform teams to define integration strategy and standards.

You will drive architecture, reliability, and long-term technical leverage across multiple vendors, mentor engineers, and influence product roadmaps while ensuring data quality, security, and performance.