AI Engineer III - Agentic AI

About 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 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.

At American Express, AI is reshaping the future of commerce and redefining the experiences our commercial customers and card members expect. Within Amex Technology, we are building platforms, products, and governance that enable agentic AI systems to operate responsibly and at scale across the enterprise.

Our focus is on agentic AI development: designing intelligent, adaptive systems that can plan, reason, and act across complex workflows with appropriate levels of autonomy. These systems power autonomous workflows, decision support, and customer-facing experiences—while meeting the high standards for security, explainability, reliability, and compliance required in financial services.

We partner closely with product, design, and business teams to deliver agentic capabilities that reduce operational friction, improve decision-making, and transform how customers interact, transact, and grow.

The Role

As an AI Engineer III – Agentic AI, you will be a hands-on builder contributing to the development of production agentic AI systems that operate on real financial data and serve real customers.

You will work alongside experienced engineers, product managers, and designers to design, build, and ship AI-powered features, while learning how to operate within a regulated, customer-facing environment. This role offers strong mentorship and opportunities to grow your technical depth in LLMs, agentic systems, and production AI engineering.

This is not a research-only role. You will write production code, contribute to system design discussions, and help operate what you build after launch, with support and guidance from more senior engineers.

Responsibilities

What You’ll Do

• Contribute to the design and implementation of LLM-powered and agentic product features.
• Build and extend agentic AI workflows that reason over context, call tools, and perform actions under guidance from senior engineers.
• Help implement and maintain retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines over financial data, with an emphasis on correctness and safety.
• Contribute to shared AI infrastructure such as LLM services, orchestration components, and evaluation or monitoring tooling.
• Participate in operating AI systems in production, including monitoring, debugging, and improving reliability and performance.
• Collaborate closely with product and design partners, learning to translate customer needs into technical solutions.

Technical Environment

We don’t hire to a narrow checklist, but candidates should be excited to grow in a modern, enterprise-scale engineering environment with a focus on agentic AI.

Core engineering stack

• Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript
• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes
• APIs and services: REST, gRPC
• Distributed systems: event-driven architectures, including Kafka

Agentic AI and ML

• Commercial and open-source LLMs integrated into agentic workflows
• Tooling for agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, vector storage, and evaluation
• Schema validation and structured data handling

AI-assisted development

• Use of AI-assisted and agentic development tools for design, implementation, testing, debugging, and refactoring
• Learning how to apply these tools responsibly while maintaining production-quality standards

All systems are built to meet high standards for reliability, security, and auditability, reflecting the responsibility of deploying autonomous AI in a financial services environment.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Some hands-on experience building or contributing to AI-powered features, LLM-based applications, or applied ML systems (professional or project-based).
• Solid engineering fundamentals in at least one backend language (Python, Go, or TypeScript).
• Familiarity with APIs, basic cloud concepts, and modern development practices.
• Interest in agentic AI systems, autonomy, and AI-assisted development workflows.
• Willingness to learn, take feedback, and grow technical ownership over time.
• Comfort working in collaborative, cross-functional teams.
• A strong customer mindset and curiosity about real-world problem solving.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to LLM tooling, prompt engineering, RAG, or agent frameworks through work, coursework, or personal projects.
• Internship or early-career experience in fintech or other regulated environments.
• Contributions to open-source projects, hackathons, or side projects related to AI or developer tooling.

Depending on factors such as business unit requirements, the nature of the position, cost and applicable laws, American Express may provide visa sponsorship for certain positions.

Work Arrangement

This role may be filled as either virtual or hybrid, depending on the selected candidate’s location and business needs. Candidates who live within commuting distance of a company office may be designated as hybrid and generally will be expected to work from the office three days per week. Candidates who do not live within commuting distance of a company office may be eligible for a virtual work arrangement, subject to company policy, business needs, and applicable law. Final work arrangement will be confirmed during the hiring process.

About Us

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.

About The Team

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 out 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 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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The below 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.

Key skills/competency

• Agentic AI
• LLM
• Python
• Go
• TypeScript
• AWS
• GCP
• Kubernetes
• REST
• gRPC