Senior Software Engineer I

The Enterprise Technology Services organization partners with every part of the American Express business to power the company’s growth and innovation with trust and efficiency, and drive competitive differentiation with speed. We support the delivery and operations of technology, digital, and data capabilities, platforms, and services globally. Specifically, our team is responsible for the company’s technology engineering, architecture, and infrastructure, providing 24x7 support to ensure an uninterrupted, high-quality experience for customers and colleagues. We also provide product management for core enterprise platforms, and lead technology risk and information security, enterprise data governance and platforms, digital product and design, and enterprise AI platforms on behalf of the company.

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 Global Merchant and Network Services Technology (GMNST) organization at American Express is responsible for modernizing the payments network to enable next-generation payments products. The team creates flexible merchant platforms to acquire, bill, pay, service and foster innovation, while enabling a payments ecosystem to connect and authenticate parties seamlessly and securely

As a Software Quality Engineer, you will join our Global Merchant and Network Services Technology team that has embarked on building a highly available and scalable distributed systems on the cloud to support the company's long-term strategy and vision. Your primary role includes driving execution across multiple Scrum teams, ensuring product backlog priorities are clearly defined, aligned to stakeholder needs, and delivered with high quality.

Key Initiatives:

• Card Network Authorizations/Routing, Clearing and Settlement.
• ATM, Debit, Credit and Push Payment Transactions.
• Platform Engineering and Foundational Capabilities of distributed systems 
• High Availability, Resiliency and Performance Engineering on Cloud

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the quality engineering strategy, architecture, standards, and roadmap for large-scale, distributed, mission-critical payment platforms.
• Provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams, influencing architecture, solution design, development practices, testing strategies, and production readiness.
• Architect, design, and develop scalable automation frameworks, platforms, tooling, and reusable quality engineering capabilities supporting functional, API, integration, system, regression, end-to-end, resiliency, and performance testing.
• Remain hands-on with engineering by developing automation solutions, reviewing code, creating proof-of-concepts, troubleshooting complex technical issues, and solving systemic quality challenges.
• Partner with architects and senior engineers during architecture and design reviews to identify quality, scalability, reliability, testability, and operational risks early in the development lifecycle.
• Establish and champion shift-left, continuous testing, testability, and quality-by-design principles throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Define enterprise-grade testing approaches for distributed systems, microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, transactional platforms, and complex system integrations.
• Develop strategies for validating high-volume financial transactions, including authorization, routing, clearing, settlement, reconciliation, and data integrity across distributed systems.
• Lead quality engineering efforts for high availability, resiliency, failover, disaster recovery, scalability, and performance of mission-critical platforms.
• Establish automated quality gates and integrate comprehensive testing capabilities into CI/CD pipelines to enable reliable and frequent software delivery.
• Define and evolve quality metrics, engineering scorecards, test coverage models, observability strategies, release readiness criteria, and production quality indicators.
• Leverage production telemetry, monitoring, logging, and observability capabilities to proactively identify quality risks and improve system reliability.
• Lead troubleshooting and root cause analysis of complex production and pre-production issues spanning application, infrastructure, cloud, database, messaging, and integration layers.
• Identify systemic engineering and quality gaps and drive long-term solutions rather than point-in-time fixes.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, open-source frameworks, AI-assisted engineering capabilities, and industry practices to continuously evolve the organization's quality engineering capabilities.
• Collaborate with engineering, product management, architecture, DevOps/SRE, security, and operations teams to ensure successful delivery of highly scalable and resilient platforms.
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to Quality Engineers and Software Engineers, raising engineering standards and strengthening quality engineering capabilities across teams.
• Influence engineering leaders and stakeholders across organizational boundaries and drive alignment on quality priorities, technical investments, risks, and remediation strategies.
• Lead quality engineering for complex, cross-functional initiatives involving globally distributed engineering teams and multiple dependent platforms.
• Champion a culture where quality, reliability, performance, and operational excellence are shared engineering responsibilities.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in Software Engineering, Software Development in Test (SDET), Quality Engineering, Test Automation, or related engineering disciplines, including significant experience providing technical leadership for complex software platforms.
• 5+ years of experience in Payments, Banking, FinTech, Financial Services, Card Networks, or other high-volume transactional environments strongly preferred.
• Deep understanding of payment processing concepts such as authorization, routing, clearing, settlement, reconciliation, ATM, debit, credit, and push-payment processing is highly desirable.
• Advanced programming skills in Java, Python, or comparable object-oriented programming languages, with demonstrated experience building production-quality automation frameworks, engineering tools, or test platforms.
• Proven experience architecting and implementing scalable automation frameworks and reusable testing capabilities for APIs, microservices, distributed systems, integration, and end-to-end workflows.
• Extensive hands-on experience with API and service testing technologies such as Rest Assured, Karate, Postman, or equivalent frameworks.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture, including microservices, asynchronous/event-driven processing, messaging, APIs, databases, caching, and service-to-service integrations.
• Strong SQL and data engineering/testing skills, with demonstrated experience validating complex transactional workflows and high-volume financial datasets.
• Extensive experience designing automated testing strategies and quality gates within CI/CD pipelines using modern DevOps and software delivery practices.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures and experience validating applications deployed on public or private cloud platforms.
• Demonstrated experience with reliability, resiliency, scalability, performance, failover, disaster recovery, and high-availability testing for mission-critical systems.
• Hands-on experience with monitoring, logging, tracing, and observability platforms such as Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, Grafana, or equivalent technologies.
• Experience supporting and troubleshooting high-volume, business-critical production systems with stringent availability and reliability requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to assess complex architectures, identify systemic quality and operational risks, and influence engineering teams toward effective technical solutions.
• Proven track record of leading quality engineering initiatives spanning multiple teams, platforms, and organizational boundaries.
• Strong understanding of Agile engineering practices and experience delivering large, complex, cross-functional technology initiatives.
• Exceptional analytical, debugging, problem-solving, and root cause analysis capabilities, with the ability to navigate complex distributed-system failures.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, establish engineering standards, influence technical direction, and drive organizational adoption of quality engineering best practices.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts and risks effectively to engineers, architects, product leaders, and senior technology stakeholders.
• Strong ownership mindset with a passion for engineering excellence, automation, operational reliability, continuous improvement, and customer-centric delivery.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline preferred.

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. From delivering differentiated products to providing world-class customer service, we operate with a strong risk mindset, ensuring we continue to uphold our brand promise of trust, security, and service.

As part of Team Amex, you’ll experience our 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.