At American Express, our culture is built on a 175-year history of innovation, shared values and Leadership Behaviors, and an unwavering commitment to back our customers, communities, and colleagues. As part of Team Amex, you'll experience this powerful backing with comprehensive support for your holistic well-being and many opportunities to learn new skills, develop as a leader, and grow your career.

Here, your voice and ideas matter, your work makes an impact, and together, you will help us define the future of American Express.

How will you make an impact in this role?

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.

We are looking for an experienced and highly motivated Staff Engineer to join our dynamic, self-led engineering team. In this role, you will provide technical leadership across multiple teams and domains, influencing architecture, mentoring engineers, and ensuring the delivery of scalable, high-quality systems that power our real-time expense management platform. This is a high-impact role suited for individuals who thrive on cross-functional collaboration, are comfortable with ambiguity, and can drive technical excellence at scale.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction for complex projects and systems, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and reliability.
• Mentor engineers across multiple teams, guiding them through design reviews, code reviews, and career development.
• Collaborate with engineering leaders, product managers, and designers to shape product strategy and execution.
• Drive architectural decisions, propose and implement improvements to system performance, scalability, and developer productivity.
• Contribute to key system components across the stack—front end, back end, and infrastructure—based on priority and team need.
• Uphold and champion Center’s engineering best practices, including CI/CD (GitHub Actions), testing, observability, and version control (Trunk based).
• Partner with stakeholders to identify and resolve technical debt, improve code quality, and reduce operational overhead.
• Investigate and resolve complex technical and performance issues using monitoring tools such as Datadog.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional experience in software engineering, with demonstrated impact in senior or staff-level roles.
• Deep expertise in at least one area of the stack (backend systems, frontend architecture, infrastructure) and solid working knowledge across the others.
• Proven experience designing and maintaining distributed, event-driven systems using Kafka, SQS, S3, Lambda, Step Functions, and other serverless technologies.
• Proficiency with modern Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, NextJS, and React.
• Experience with modern communication protocols such as tRPC, gRPC, and websockets.
• Strong understanding of SQL and relational databases, ideally with experience using CockroachDB.
• Experience with ECS and Kubernetes for deploying and scaling containerized applications.
• Experience with analytical databases such as Click House or Tinybird.
• Strong testing mindset with experience in unit, integration, and end-to-end test development using Go Test, and related tools.
• Demonstrated ability to lead by influence and communicate complex technical concepts clearly across diverse stakeholders.
• Experience working in a fast-paced, high-accountability environment with a strong culture of ownership.
• Experience working in real-time financial or expense management applications.
• Familiarity with feature flagging and observability tools such as Launch Darkly.
• Experience working at an enterprise-scale organization.

Salary Range: $144,250.00 to $256,250.00 annually + bonus + equity (if applicable) + benefits

The above represents the expected salary range for this job requisition. Ultimately, in determining your pay, we’ll consider your location, experience, and other job-related factors.

We back you with benefits that support your holistic well-being so you can be and deliver your best. This means caring for you and your loved ones' physical, financial, and mental health, as well as providing the flexibility you need to thrive personally and professionally:

• Competitive base salaries
• Bonus incentives
• 6% Company Match on retirement savings plan
• Free financial coaching and financial well-being support
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits
• Flexible working model with hybrid, onsite or virtual arrangements depending on role and business need
• 20+ weeks paid parental leave for all parents, regardless of gender, offered for pregnancy, adoption or surrogacy
• Free access to global on-site wellness centers staffed with nurses and doctors (depending on location)
• Free and confidential counseling support through our Healthy Minds program
• Career development and training opportunities

For a full list of Team Amex benefits, visit our Colleague Benefits Site.

American Express is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status, age, or any other status protected by law. American Express will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in accordance with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including, but not limited to, the California Fair Chance Act, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance. For positions covered by federal and/or state banking regulations, American Express will comply with such regulations as it relates to the consideration of applicants with criminal convictions.

We back our colleagues with the support they need to thrive, professionally and personally. That's why we have Amex Flex, our enterprise working model that provides greater flexibility to colleagues while ensuring we preserve the important aspects of our unique in-person culture. Depending on role and business needs, colleagues will either work onsite, in a hybrid model (combination of in-office and virtual days) or fully virtually.

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