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.
American Express is looking for a Senior Technical Program Manager to lead reliability programs across enterprise platforms that serve tens of millions of Card Members worldwide. You'll be part of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and partner with Engineering, Application Support, Infrastructure and Product. Together you'll make critical customer journeys measurably more available, resilient and observable, and cheaper to run. You'll have enough technical depth to challenge designs and enough influence to align senior leaders across global markets (primarily US, UK and India).
ResponsibilitiesOwn the SRE program roadmap. Turn reliability strategy into multi-quarter programs with clear goals, milestones and measurable outcomes (SLO attainment, MTTD/MTTR, toil reduction, DR readiness).
Make SLOs and error budgets work in practice. Drive SLI/SLO definition with service owners and set up error-budget policies. Use budget burn to help teams choose between feature work and reliability work.
Drive production readiness. Run production readiness and launch reviews for new services, migrations and major changes. Cover capacity planning, failure-mode analysis, rollback plans and observability coverage.
Strengthen incident and problem management. Coordinate major-incident response with Application Support. Run blameless postmortems and make sure corrective actions are prioritized, tracked and closed, so the same incidents don't keep happening.
Prove resilience. Lead DR and failover/failback programs, including regular testing, automation, game days and resilience (chaos) testing. Keep regulatory and audit compliance on track.
Expand observability. Drive adoption of metrics, logs, tracing, synthetic monitoring and actionable alerting across critical journeys, with a focus on cutting alert noise and detection time.
Reduce toil with automation and AI. Measure manual operational work and run programs to automate it. Include AI-enabled capabilities such as AIOps event correlation, AI-assisted RCA and self-healing runbooks.
Run disciplined execution at scale. Lead SAFe/Agile planning (including PI Planning), cross-team dependencies, capacity, budget and vendor commitments. Give executives concise, data-driven updates on program health, risk and reliability trends.
Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
12+ years of technical program or project management experience, including 5+ years delivering programs in SRE, infrastructure or production operations for mission-critical systems.
Experience leading cross-functional programs across multiple engineering teams in globally distributed organizations.
Working knowledge of SRE principles: SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, error budgets, incident and problem management, and disaster recovery.
Technical understanding of distributed systems, microservices, APIs, cloud infrastructure, containers/Kubernetes and CI/CD.
Experience setting up SLO and error-budget practices, or production readiness review processes, in a large enterprise.
Experience with observability platforms such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus or OpenTelemetry, plus synthetic monitoring.
Experience running DR, failover and resilience testing programs in regulated environments (financial services preferred).
Experience with AIOps or AI-enabled operational automation.
Familiarity with ITIL incident, problem and change management, and how they fit with modern SRE practice.
SAFe or Agile certification, and experience managing program financials and vendor relationships.
Ability to read design documents, find reliability and scalability risks, and lead engineering teams through tradeoff decisions.
Excellent written and verbal communication, including executive-level storytelling backed by data.
Influence without authority across SRE, Engineering, Application Support, Product and business leaders.
Own outcomes from start to finish: anticipate risks, clear blockers and deliver on commitments.
Promote a blameless, engineering-first culture that prioritizes prevention over firefighting.
Coach and mentor colleagues and contractors, and build an inclusive, collaborative team across regions.
Make decisions based on customer impact and long-term reliability, balancing urgent operational needs against lasting improvements.
Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 12+ years of technical program or project management experience.
- 5+ years delivering programs in SRE, infrastructure, or production operations for mission-critical systems.
- Experience leading cross-functional programs across multiple engineering teams in globally distributed organizations.
- Working knowledge of SRE principles, including SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, incident management, problem management, and disaster recovery.
- Technical understanding of distributed systems, microservices, APIs, cloud infrastructure, containers, Kubernetes, and CI/CD.
- Experience establishing SLO and error-budget practices or production readiness review processes in a large enterprise.
- Experience with Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or synthetic monitoring.
- Experience running disaster recovery, failover, and resilience testing programs in regulated environments.
- Experience with AIOps or AI-enabled operational automation.
- Familiarity with ITIL incident, problem, and change management.
- SAFe or Agile certification and experience managing program financials and vendor relationships.
- Ability to read design documents, identify reliability and scalability risks, and lead engineering teams through tradeoff decisions.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including executive-level data-driven storytelling.
- Employment eligibility to work in the United States.
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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Strong & Reliable Incentives — Bonuses are often viewed as strong and materially boost total compensation when combined with benefits. Company-performance bonuses are highlighted as a recurring strength.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid time off and paid leave are frequently highlighted as strengths within the total rewards package. These policies support work-life balance and contribute meaningfully to overall satisfaction.
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Retirement Support — Retirement benefits are frequently mentioned as a positive component of the package. These offerings add tangible value 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.
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