Senior AI Engineer II - Forward Deployment - Enterprise AI Platforms
American Express · Sunnyvale, CA, United States ·
- Seniority
- Senior
- Category
- AI engineering
American Express · Sunnyvale, CA, United States ·
Why Join American Express
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 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 Enterprise AI Platform organization partners with business and technology teams to shape the Enterprise AI strategy, bring emerging technologies to the forefront, and build scalable, reusable AI platforms. This team plays a pivotal role in enabling American Express to operate as an AI-powered enterprise by equipping teams with the skills, platforms, and seamless deployment capabilities needed to accelerate responsible AI innovation, enhance decision-making, and drive customer impact with speed and scale.
Join a team shaping the future of AI at American Express. You will work directly with business and product leaders to turn high-value opportunities into trusted, secure, and responsible AI solutions, while helping successful ideas become reusable capabilities across the enterprise.
FDE partners across American Express to transform high-value business opportunities into trusted, secure, and scalable AI solutions delivering measurable outcomes, accelerating adoption, and turning successful innovations into reusable enterprise capabilities.
Role Summary
As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer, you will partner closely with business units, product teams, and engineering organizations to identify and reframe high-value opportunities, translate business challenges into clear value propositions, and build working solutions using Generative AI, agentic systems, and intelligent automation.
You will take opportunities from discovery and demonstration through proof of value, production scaling, adoption, and transition to long-term ownership. Demonstrations are a means of validating grounded value propositions, not the end goal. You will be accountable for advancing credible opportunities into real adoption and durable ways of working, with each stage tied to measurable outcomes and balanced with enterprise requirements for security, reliability, and responsible AI.
This is a hands-on engineering role with a significant stakeholder engagement component. You will influence without direct authority, communicate across levels of seniority and technical familiarity, and work alongside engineers to build and deploy reliable software.
You will challenge assumptions about how work is performed, analyze processes as systems, and identify the technical, operational, and organizational levers that can improve them. You will define a longer-term direction while sequencing practical near-term solutions that build toward it.
Candidates may come from mobile, web, backend, distributed-systems, or workflow-platform backgrounds. What matters most is the ability to understand a system end to end, form a point of view, engage deeply with users, and turn direction into working software.
Opportunity discovery and transformation
- Build trusted relationships and develop a deep understanding of business priorities, user needs, operational workflows, and sources of friction.
- Challenge existing assumptions, map processes as systems, and identify the technical, operational, and organizational changes most likely to improve them.
- Lead discovery sessions that translate business needs into clear use cases, value propositions, measurable success criteria, and solution direction.
- Assess opportunities based on business value, technical feasibility, user impact, risk, and readiness for adoption.
- Define a longer-term vision and identify the smallest useful intervention that can validate the opportunity while preserving a path to broader transformation.
Solution design and delivery
- Design, build, and deploy Generative AI, agentic AI, and intelligent automation solutions using approved enterprise platform capabilities.
- Develop working demonstrations and proofs of value that test assumptions and measure business impact.
- Take solutions through prototyping, production scaling, adoption, and transition to long-term ownership.
- Build agents and AI-enabled workflows that interact with enterprise APIs, knowledge sources, data platforms, applications, code, and business processes.
- Incorporate appropriate human input, approval, escalation, and fallback mechanisms.
- Work directly alongside engineering teams to produce software and apply the architecture, testing, deployment, and operational practices required for production use.
- Use experimentation selectively to reduce uncertainty while balancing speed with security, reliability, maintainability, and governance.
AI-enabled engineering practices
- Use coding agents and AI-assisted engineering techniques to accelerate discovery, implementation, testing, documentation, and iteration.
- Apply specification-driven development, context management, iterative planning, and structured knowledge repositories to preserve context and improve personal productivity.
- Evaluate agent-generated code and technical outputs for correctness, security, maintainability, and architectural alignment.
- Identify where AI-enabled development practices can improve engineering throughput without compromising operational standards.
Platform contribution and scale
- Generalize patterns and components developed through individual engagements for broader use.
- Partner with platform and product teams to turn successful prototypes into reusable features, accelerators, reference architectures, and paved-road implementation patterns.
- Capture lessons from deployments and use them to influence the enterprise AI platform and product roadmap.
- Help teams adopt AI-enabled workflows and transition solutions into sustainable operating models.
Evaluation, governance, and responsible AI
- Develop evaluation approaches that measure solution quality, task completion, business outcomes, user experience, latency, cost, and reliability.
- Identify and address failure modes through testing, monitoring, safeguards, and iterative improvement.
- Ensure solutions meet American Express requirements for security, privacy, risk management, responsible AI, and regulatory compliance.
- Establish appropriate controls for model access, enterprise data, tool use, human oversight, and production operations.
Stakeholder leadership
- Communicate technical concepts, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations to audiences with different levels of technical familiarity and seniority.
- Influence decisions and drive alignment across business, product, engineering, risk, and platform teams without relying on direct reporting authority.
- Maintain strong stakeholder relationships throughout discovery, delivery, adoption, and transition, and mentor partner teams on AI solution delivery.
- 5 or more years of experience delivering software, technical solutions, or digital products in an engineering, architecture, or technical consulting capacity.
- Demonstrated ability to take an ambiguous business or user problem through discovery, implementation, and measurable validation.
- Experience using coding agents in a structured engineering workflow, including specification-driven development, context management, iterative implementation, and reusable knowledge repositories.
- Software engineering fluency and the ability to contribute directly to applications, integrations, services, or technical prototypes.
- Experience in at least one relevant domain, such as mobile, web, backend services, APIs, distributed systems, platform engineering, workflow orchestration, or cloud-native development.
- Ability to reason about systems end to end, identify constraints and leverage points, and connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
- Strong communication and stakeholder-partnership skills, including the ability to explain technical concepts, challenge existing approaches constructively, and influence without direct authority.
- Ability to define a longer-term direction and sequence incremental solutions that build toward it.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building or deploying solutions powered by language models, agentic systems, or AI-enabled process flows.
- Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, tool calling, model context protocols, knowledge retrieval, or workflow technologies such as Temporal, LangGraph, LangChain, or LlamaIndex.
- Experience designing human-in-the-loop controls and operational safeguards, with knowledge of AI evaluation, observability, and responsible AI.
- Experience supporting technology adoption or operating-model transformation, particularly in financial services or another regulated industry.
Success Measures
Success in this role will be measured by:
- AI opportunities that progress from discovery to proof of value and, where appropriate, production adoption.
- Measurable business outcomes tied to clearly defined KPIs.
- Ability to identify and reframe valuable opportunities while connecting near-term delivery to longer-term transformation.
- Solutions that improve the broader workflow and are adopted into sustainable operating models.
- Strong stakeholder relationships, technical quality, and effective management of security, risk, and reliability.
- Reusable capabilities and implementation patterns incorporated into the enterprise AI platform.
Working Model and Travel
Occasional travel may be required for workshops or key delivery milestones, but frequent travel is not expected. Roles may be based near selected American Express offices to support close partnerships with regional business and product teams.