Senior Software Engineer - GCST

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 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.

The Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design and build distributed systems and APIs that power mission-critical commercial payment experiences. You will own end-to-end delivery — from architecture and design to deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.

You’ll work on complex, high-impact initiatives, drive engineering excellence, and mentor teammates while helping shape the technical direction of our platforms.

What You’ll Do

Architecture & Development

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services using Java (Spring Boot), GraphQL, Node.js, and event-driven frameworks (e.g., Vert.x)

• Architect and implement event-driven, domain-driven systems that solve core business problems

• Develop internal and external APIs consumed across teams and enterprise platforms

• Integrate with enterprise systems such as Risk, Sanctions, CRM, Acquisitions, and other shared services

Data & Reliability

• Design and optimize data models using SQL and NoSQL databases

• Write efficient queries, stored procedures, and manage transactional integrity

• Implement resiliency patterns (retries, circuit breakers, alerts, observability)

• Proactively monitor systems using tools such as Splunk and enterprise observability platforms

Quality & Engineering Excellence

• Write comprehensive unit, integration, and automation tests

• Conduct thoughtful code reviews and mentor peers through pair programming

• Debug across distributed systems using IDE tooling, logs, tracing, and monitoring systems

• Maintain high-quality documentation (README, Confluence, architecture docs)

DevOps & Delivery

• Deliver software from design to production using CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, XLR)

• Deploy services to our Enterprise Cloud Platform

• Own delivery of strategic initiatives, even when requirements are ambiguous

• Work within Agile frameworks using tools such as Rally and Jira

Technical Leadership

• Contribute to architecture discussions and technology decisions

• Promote engineering best practices and modern backend design patterns

• Present new technologies, industry trends, and innovative ideas to peers

• Foster a culture of continuous learning and operational excellence