Director Observability Jobs in Arizona (NOW HIRING)

The U.S. Consumer Services and Membership Digital Experiences Technology team (USCDT) brings together foundational strategic technology capabilities in digital experience engineering (Mobile and Web), marketing and advertising technology, enterprise communications, travel and lifestyle, and dining technology. It employs a ground-breaking focus with development responsibilities for customer-facing capabilities that deepen and expand digital engagement, as well as core technical capabilities that cut across business lines and customer segments. 

American Express Travel & Lifestyle Technology builds platforms that power premium travel experiences for millions of Card Members. We partner with industry-leading third parties to deliver booking, inventory, and fulfillment capabilities at scale, with high expectations for reliability, performance, and customer experience.

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical ownership and leadership for these critical third-party travel platforms.

About the Role

This role owns the technical health and evolution of Amex's most important external travel integrations. Sitting at the intersection of architecture, vendor engineering, and internal platform development, you will define integration strategy, reduce systemic risk, and drive technical leverage across teams and partners.
This role is not focused on day-to-day incident response or feature delivery. It is focused on architecture, standards, influence, and long-term outcomes.

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, distributed systems in production.
• Demonstrated ownership of mission-critical third-party or SaaS integrations, including architecture, reliability, and lifecycle management.
• Deep expertise in API design and integration patterns, including synchronous and asynchronous workflows, versioning, and backward compatibility.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including fault tolerance, latency tradeoffs, consistency models, and failure isolation.
• Hands-on experience designing for resilience and high availability, including retries, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and multi-vendor strategies.
• Experience implementing contract testing, schema governance, and pre-production validation for external integrations.
• Strong data engineering fundamentals, including data modeling, reconciliation, data quality controls, and lineage across system boundaries.
• Experience partnering with SRE and platform teams to improve observability and operational maturity.
• Solid understanding of integration security architecture, including authentication, authorization, secure networking, and sensitive data protection.

• Proven ability to translate technical risk into business impact and influence decisions across engineering, product, and external partners.

  Preferred Experience

• Experience in travel, payments, commerce, or other real-time transactional domains.
• Prior responsibility for vendor technical relationships, including roadmap influence and participation in renewal or replacement decisions.
• Experience defining and enforcing integration standards across multiple teams or platforms.
• Strong cloud-native architecture experience (AWS or equivalent), including networking and observability tooling.
• Experience evaluating vendors, leading build vs buy decisions, or executing platform migrations.
• Familiarity with modern API gateways, event-driven architectures, and service-to-service communication patterns.

• Experience supporting analytics or AI use cases that depend on third-party data, with an emphasis on traceability and compliance.

  Core Competencies

• Distributed systems and integration architecture
• API design and lifecycle management
• Reliability engineering and failure analysis
• Technical leadership and influence without authority
• Cross-team and cross-company collaboration
• Strategic thinking with a focus on long-term technical leverage

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.

• Act as the single technical owner for all critical third-party travel platforms, including booking, inventory, and fulfillment providers.
• Define and maintain integration architecture, standards, and patterns that support reliability, scalability, observability, and vendor isolation.
• Serve as the primary technical counterpart to vendor engineering leadership, including directors and CTOs.
• Push vendors on API design, performance, reliability, security posture, network architecture, and operational readiness.
• Influence vendor product roadmaps and provide technical input into vendor selection, renewal, and replacement decisions.
• Establish API contract governance, versioning standards, and automated contract testing to prevent breaking changes.
• Partner with SRE to address systemic integration risks and ensure durable remediation of recurring issues without owning day-to-day support.
• Drive resilience practices including graceful degradation, dependency isolation, and multi-vendor fallback strategies.
• Define data quality, consistency, and lineage expectations for third-party data flows in partnership with Data and Product teams.
• Support contract negotiations with clear technical acceptance criteria, SLAs, and non-functional requirements.
• Collaborate with enterprise architecture and internal platform staff engineers to align with portfolio and enterprise strategy.
• Mentor engineers across teams on integration design, distributed systems tradeoffs, and vendor constraints.
• Work closely with product and business architecture to surface technical risks early and shape roadmap decisions.
• Hands-on development of proof of concepts (POCs) and rapid prototypes to validate new technologies, AI capabilities, and customer experience innovations, including collaboration with third-party partners and vendors where applicable