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.
The Digital Banking & Payments organization is building the next generation of banking and payment capabilities that power customer experiences across American Express. Our platform enables teams to launch and scale financial products while supporting critical money movement, payment processing, settlement, reconciliation, and data services.
We are seeking engineers who are passionate about solving complex business problems through innovation, engineering excellence, and modern data practices. As a Senior Mainframe & Data Engineer, you will help evolve core transaction processing and data platforms that operate at enterprise scale while enabling greater agility, real-time processing, and integration across the Digital Banking ecosystem.
You will partner closely with product, engineering, and operations teams to deliver resilient, scalable, and high-performing solutions. We embrace a culture of experimentation, continuous learning, and collaboration, and welcome individuals who challenge assumptions and drive meaningful improvements.
Responsibilities:
- Enhance payment processing applications and data platforms across mainframe and distributed environments.
- Build scalable capabilities supporting money movement, clearing, settlement, reconciliation, and reporting.
- Enable platform modernization through APIs, event-driven architectures, and enterprise data integration.
- Deliver batch and real-time processing solutions for high-volume transaction workloads.
- Partner with business and product teams to understand data requirements and define scalable data architectures.
- Maintain and improve data pipelines, application frameworks, and supporting services.
- Contribute as a core member of an Agile team through story refinement, technical design, implementation, testing, and deployment.
- Improve platform performance, data quality, resiliency, and operational efficiency.
- Advance observability, automation, and service reliability practices.
- Participate in technical reviews and drive engineering best practices.
- Support production environments through troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
Qualifications – Required
- Extensive experience working in IBM z/OS environments.
- Strong proficiency with COBOL, JCL, DB2, CICS, IMS, VSAM, or related mainframe technologies.
- Experience supporting high-volume transaction processing systems within banking, payments, financial services, or other regulated industries.
- Strong understanding of data engineering concepts including ingestion, transformation, quality, metadata management, and lineage.
- Experience with batch and real-time data processing patterns.
- Experience with relational databases such as DB2, Oracle, PostgreSQL, or equivalent platforms.
- Experience integrating mainframe applications with distributed systems using APIs, messaging platforms, or event-driven architectures.
- Working knowledge of Kafka, IBM MQ, or similar messaging technologies.
- Understanding of banking and payments domains including money movement, ACH, settlement, reconciliation, or ISO20022 messaging standards.
- Experience supporting highly available, mission-critical platforms with demanding service-level objectives.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and troubleshooting skills.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
Qualifications – Preferred
- Experience with Python and object-oriented programming concepts.
- Experience with PySpark, Spark SQL, distributed data processing, and large-scale data platforms.
- Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, Hadoop, or similar analytics platforms.
- Familiarity with data governance and metadata management tools.
- Experience with REST APIs and API specifications.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, containerization technologies, and cloud platforms.
- Experience with real-time event ingestion and streaming architectures.
- Knowledge of Digital Banking products and payment ecosystems including ACH, Zelle, account funding, and related money movement capabilities.
Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.
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 TeamWe 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 our Colleague Benefits Site.
Skills Required
- Extensive experience working in IBM z/OS environments.
- Strong proficiency with COBOL, JCL, DB2, CICS, IMS, VSAM, or related mainframe technologies.
- Experience supporting high-volume transaction processing systems within banking, payments, financial services, or other regulated industries.
- Strong understanding of data engineering concepts including ingestion, transformation, quality, metadata management, and lineage.
- Experience with batch and real-time data processing patterns.
- Experience with relational databases such as DB2, Oracle, PostgreSQL, or equivalent platforms.
- Experience integrating mainframe applications with distributed systems using APIs, messaging platforms, or event-driven architectures.
- Working knowledge of Kafka, IBM MQ, or similar messaging technologies.
- Understanding of banking and payments domains including money movement, ACH, settlement, reconciliation, or ISO20022 messaging standards.
- Experience supporting highly available, mission-critical platforms with demanding service-level objectives.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and troubleshooting skills.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
- Experience with Python and object-oriented programming concepts.
- Experience with PySpark, Spark SQL, distributed data processing, and large-scale data platforms.
- Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, Hadoop, or similar analytics platforms.
- Familiarity with data governance and metadata management tools.
- Experience with REST APIs and API specifications.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, containerization technologies, and cloud platforms.
- Experience with real-time event ingestion and streaming architectures.
- Knowledge of Digital Banking products and payment ecosystems including ACH, Zelle, account funding, and related money movement capabilities.
American Express Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about American Express and has not been reviewed or approved by American Express.
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Healthcare Strength — Pay is often viewed as attractive when combined with comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage that supports day-to-day needs. The benefits package is also framed as especially helpful for those supporting dependents.
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Retirement Support — Retirement benefits are positioned as a meaningful part of total rewards through a 401(k) plan with company matching. Financial wellness services and coaching are also highlighted as strengthening longer-term financial security.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid time off is repeatedly characterized as generous and a valued component of the overall package. Time off and flexibility are presented as helping the total rewards feel more complete beyond base salary.
American Express Insights
What We Do
At American Express, we know that with the right backing, people and businesses have the power to progress in incredible ways. Whether we’re supporting our customers’ financial confidence to move ahead, taking commerce to new heights, or encouraging people to explore the world, our colleagues are constantly striving to uphold our powerful backing promise to our customers and each other every day. These beliefs have been our North Star for 170 years as our business transformed – from helping evacuate travelers during World Wars, to ensuring the safety of our customers’ funds during the Great Depression in the U.S., to creating the Shop Small® movement to help small businesses recover from the Financial Crisis, to providing aid to communities impacted by many natural disasters and so much more. For generations, the key to our success has been the determination and resilience of our American Express colleagues. Now, as a globally integrated payments company, we work together to provide customers with access to products, insights and world-class experiences that enrich lives and build business success. Join us and let’s lead the way together.
