Engineering Director - Engineering Lifecycle & SRE for GCS Platforms

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Engineering Director, Engineering Lifecycle & SRE for GCS Platforms

As American Express Global Commercial Products and Customers have grown in complexity and scale, reliability and stability have become the number one priority across our products. We need a leader who can work alongside Engineering, Service Operations and Product to develop platform strategy and evolve a reliability culture driven for higher customer value. The ideal candidate for this role is a seasoned SaaS product engineering leader who has a passion for reliability and has experience running a site reliability function and/or Engineering Lifecycle Services function with focus on developer and transformative platform experiences.

This role will be located in Phoenix, will have responsibility for SDLC services across ALL of Global Commercial Services. True executive presence to influence and execute operational (Site Reliability Engineering) and developer excellence across multiple VP organization within unit CIOs.

What you get to do every day:

• Set the reliability vision and strategy for GCS. Build a software development culture where resiliency and availability are not an after-thought.
• Work with global teams to define service goals, objectives, and metrics to ensure alignment and consistency.
• Platform architecture & engineering guidance to optimize, improve and scale multi-product platforms across Global Commercial Services.
• Ensure that our global teams have the best tools to diagnose, resolve and operate highly scalable and predictable product platforms.
• Build a culture of reliability by embracing challenging and complex development to training engineers on the best ways to build resilient and reactive systems. Lead to remove the dependencies on a separate Devops team by providing the vision and tools to build more resilient systems at the time of development.
• SRE leader within unit CIO level to optimize, share best practicing operational excellence.
• Partner with Product Management, Engineering, and Operations to orchestrate platform roadmaps.
• Bring impactful changes at unit CIO level with innovative product solutions and delivery.
• Champion teams to guide, train, implement cloud aware product solutions across GCS.
• Design, build and operate our Engineering Lifecycle & Services team, that will have a dedicated group of engineering and analytic resources building out platforms.
  
  • The team will have dedicated analysts building out Platform analytics and continually searching for resilience improvement opportunities. Part of our missions included gathering data on the services we support, building a system to manage and monitor SLAs, and documenting the product limits we have in place.
  • Scaled analytical solution to measure engineering excellence across unit CIOs by building pipelines to procure, standardize, synthesis and visualize disparate data sources and help leaders to change behaviors via data driven culture.
  • The team will have a dedicated Program Manager to help to manage and monitor compliance and reporting for GCS ensuring that all systems are always up to date and fulfill all compliance requirements. This includes managing the Total Cost of Application Infrastructure (TCAI) budget and controlling infrastructure costs.
  • In GCST we want to integrate many service reliabilities practices into what we do, but we won't succeed at that by just copying some other company's organization. This leader will implement what is right for GCST in an enterprise way and set the gold standard for AET within American Express.
• Participate in infrastructure design and implementation decisions.
  
  • Guide and lead team to build enterprise scale cloud native tools to improve developer experience, infrastructure optimization and productivity.
  • Create product, platform and implementation strategies for Developer's Experience and Platform Engineering for Global Commercial Services and American Experience Technologies.
• Drive transformation, innovation and manage high performing engineering team within a fast paced, agile environment.
• Attract, retain and grow top engineering talent, providing guidance, career development and mentorship to team members.
• Executive presence to lead unit CIO organizations to implement developer and operational experience.
• Strong understanding of industry trend in developer, DevOps, SRE and SecOps.
• Work closely with our Disaster Recovery & Service Operations Management teams.
• Be the mentor and guide for the team for technologies, architecture and best practices of engineering deliveries.

As part of our diverse tech team, you can architect, code and ship software that makes us an essential part of our customers' digital lives. Here, you can work alongside talented engineers in an open, supportive, inclusive environment where your voice is valued, and you make your own decisions on what tech to use to solve challenging problems. Amex offers a range of opportunities to work with the latest technologies and encourages you to back the broader engineering community through open source. And because we understand the importance of keeping your skills fresh and relevant, we give you dedicated time to invest in your professional development. Find your place in technology on #TeamAmex.

What you bring to the role:

• You have 5+ years of experience leading, building and growing engineering teams. Past expertise of leading complex Site Reliability Engineers (or equivalent) ideally working with large, distributed Internet-facing systems.
• You have demonstrated unit CIO level experience in operational excellence for resilient application development with consistent automation enablement to go faster with high quality to have seamless digital and data customer experience at global scale
• You have navigated complex technical environments which have grown in complexity due to rapid growth and legacy systems.
  
  • You have demonstrated capabilities building relationships across organization boundaries enrolling teams that don't work for you into your vision for service reliability.
• You have experience being on-call for critical web-based and data systems.
• You have excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• You are at home presenting on-stage and giving updates to executives.
• You have an ability to effectively plan and manage complex, cross-team projects.
• You have strong coaching, mentoring, and teaching skills.
• You value people over process but know how to scale an organization through light weight process and organizational design.
• You are hands on with technology. Perhaps not coding daily, but able to contribute to discussions.
• Monolith destruction and container orchestration experience are a plus.
• You have a strong opinion on the statement Embracing Challenging and Complex domains is the only way to build reliable systems.
• You are methodical and precise in nature and have a history of keeping teams honest in a productive manner.
• You have experience as a DevOps / SRE / SecOps leader and made significance changes to developer and customer experience.
• You have experience in delivering scaled analytics using data solutions as events, cache, big data tech stacks.
• You have experience leading project teams to take projects from concept to completion.
• You have experience of strong understanding Machine Learning and various statistical modeling.
• You have experience as a hands-on architect with the ability to design and architect large scale web and analytical applications.
• You have good experience and knowledge of cloud implementation at infrastructure level and cloud aware application development.
• Strong acumen of public cloud and / or private cloud implementation and application adoption.
• Strong understanding of SOA, Restful, Event Driven, and Microservices technologies for large scale environments.
• You are experienced in developing software in an open-source way and can foreshadow the tools required to manage multiple teams sharing code bases including building out dashboards that monitor the health of the component branches etc. Such tools will give GCS and AET the flexibility to move quickly, focus on innovation, and scale with their growth.

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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