Staff Software Engineer - Agentic AI

American Express New York, NY
Full Time Lead Level 10+ years Visa Sponsorship

Posted 2 weeks ago

Interested in this position?

Upload your resume and we'll match you with this and other relevant opportunities.

Upload Your Resume

About This Role

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a senior individual contributor helping to define, design, build, and operate agentic AI systems across the company. This role involves driving technical direction, designing core frameworks, writing production code, and guiding teams through complex technical decisions without people management responsibilities.

Responsibilities

  • Drive technical direction for agentic AI initiatives, influencing architecture patterns, autonomy boundaries, and system design
  • Design, build, and operate production-grade agentic AI systems used across multiple products
  • Own and evolve shared agentic AI capabilities, including agent frameworks, orchestration layers, planning, tool use, memory strategies, retrieval and grounding (RAG) pipelines, LLM infrastructure, and evaluation tooling
  • Lead technical design reviews and help teams navigate tradeoffs involving autonomy, safety, reliability, scalability, and cost
  • Partner across teams to deliver complex, cross-cutting agentic AI initiatives from concept to production
  • Evaluate emerging models, techniques, and agentic patterns and translate them into practical, enterprise-ready improvements
  • Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar for agentic AI development

Requirements

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience delivering agentic AI or LLM-powered systems to production
  • Proven ownership of complex, cross-cutting agentic systems spanning multiple teams or products
  • Strong engineering fundamentals across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure
  • Deep experience across the agentic AI stack, including planning, tool use, memory, and evaluation
  • Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows
  • Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and translating them into shipped, reliable autonomous systems
  • Ability to influence technical direction and align teams without formal authority
  • Experience in workflow engines, async processing, queues, and streaming systems

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience, including deep, hands-on experience delivering agentic AI or LLM-powered systems to production

Nice to Have

  • Experience building agentic systems in fintech or other regulated industries
  • Experience as a founding engineer or early technical leader in AI-driven products
  • Demonstrated success delivering technically complex autonomous systems that customers actively rely on
  • Meaningful contributions to open-source AI or agentic frameworks
  • Familiarity with fine-tuning, model optimization and inference pipelines

Skills

Python * AWS * Kubernetes * TensorFlow * PyTorch * REST * Go * TypeScript * LangChain * Kafka * GCP * LlamaIndex * Pydantic * gRPC * Hugging Face * tRPC * Semantic Kernel * CrewAI * Zod *

* Required skills

Benefits

Life Insurance
Competitive base salaries
20+ weeks paid parental leave for all parents
Free access to global on-site wellness centers staffed with nurses and doctors
Disability benefits
6% Company Match on retirement savings plan
Career development and training opportunities
Dental
Vision
Comprehensive medical
Free financial coaching and financial well-being support
Free and confidential counseling support through Healthy Minds program

About American Express

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.

Finance
View all jobs at American Express →