Senior Staff Software Engineer - Remote Role at American Express

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer - Remote to join our dynamic team at American Express. In this role, you will provide technical leadership across multiple teams and domains, influencing architecture, mentoring engineers, and ensuring the delivery of scalable, high-quality systems that power our real-time expense management platform.

What You'll Do

• Lead the technical direction for complex projects and systems, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and reliability.
• Mentor engineers across multiple teams, guiding them through design reviews, code reviews, and career development.
• Collaborate with engineering leaders, product managers, and designers to shape product strategy and execution.
• Drive architectural decisions, propose and implement improvements to system performance, scalability, and developer productivity.
• Contribute to key system components across the stack—front end, back end, and infrastructure—based on priority and team need.
• Uphold and champion engineering best practices, including CI/CD (GitHub Actions), testing, observability, and version control.
• Partner with stakeholders to identify and resolve technical debt, improve code quality, and reduce operational overhead.
• Investigate and resolve complex technical and performance issues using monitoring tools such as Datadog.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional experience in software engineering, with demonstrated impact in senior or staff-level roles.
• Deep expertise in at least one area of the stack (backend systems, frontend architecture, infrastructure) and solid working knowledge across the others.
• Proven experience designing and maintaining distributed, event-driven systems using technologies like Kafka, SQS, S3, Lambda, and Step Functions.
• Proficiency with modern Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, NextJS, and React.
• Experience with modern communication protocols such as tRPC, gRPC, and websockets.
• Strong understanding of SQL and relational databases, ideally with experience using CockroachDB.
• Experience with ECS and Kubernetes for deploying and scaling containerized applications.
• Strong testing mindset with experience in unit, integration, and end-to-end test development.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in real-time financial or expense management applications.
• Familiarity with feature flagging and observability tools such as LaunchDarkly.
• Experience working at an enterprise-scale organization.

What We Offer

• Competitive base salaries and 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.
• Free access to global on-site wellness centers staffed with nurses and doctors.
• Free and confidential counseling support through our Healthy Minds program.
• Career development and training opportunities.