Senior AI Engineer I - Global Dining

Job ID: 26012702Posted: 2026-09-23Location: New York, NY, United States; Chicago, IL, United StatesSalary: $123000 - $215250 annually + bonus + benefitsJob Function: Engineering & ArchitectureSchedule: Full timeWorkplace: HybridCareer Area: TechnologyCompany: American ExpressDescriptionJoining Amex Tech means discovering and shaping your contribution to something big. Here, you can work alongside talented technology teams and build a unique career with the Powerful Backing of American Express. With opportunities to work with the latest technologies and a commitment to supporting the broader engineering community, our mission is to power your success. Amex Tech is powered by our technology, our culture, and our colleagues.The U.S. Consumer Services and Membership Digital Experiences Technology team (USCDT) brings together foundational strategic technology capabilities across digital experience engineering, marketing and advertising technology, enterprise communications, travel and lifestyle, and dining technology. The organization builds customer-facing capabilities that deepen digital engagement as well as core technology platforms that span business lines and customer segments.American Express Global Dining brings together world-class experiences through platforms such as Resy, Tock, and Rooam, creating seamless connections between diners, restaurants, and the broader American Express Membership ecosystem. Our mission is to define the future of hospitality and dining through technology, data, and design.As part of Team Amex, you’ll have the support, flexibility, and autonomy to make an impact while helping shape the future of how people discover, book, and enjoy dining experiences worldwide.At American Express, AI is reshaping the future of commerce and redefining the experiences our customers, merchants, and Card Members expect. Within Global Dining, housed within Amex Technology, we are applying AI to reimagine how diners discover and experience restaurants, how restaurants engage and serve their guests, and how our colleagues build and operate the platforms behind those experiences.Our focus is increasingly on agentic AI: intelligent systems capable of understanding context, reasoning, planning, using tools, and taking actions across complex workflows with appropriate levels of autonomy. These capabilities have the potential to transform dining discovery, reservations, restaurant operations, customer servicing, and the engineering systems that power the Global Dining ecosystem.We are building these capabilities with the reliability, security, explainability, observability, and governance required to operate AI at American Express scale.THE ROLEAs a Senior AI Engineer – Agentic AI, Global Dining, you will be a hands-on engineer responsible for designing, building, integrating, and operating AI-powered capabilities across the Global Dining ecosystem.You will develop production AI systems that apply large language models, retrieval, tools, orchestration, machine learning, and generative AI to real-world customer, restaurant, and platform workflows. You will work across the AI application stack—from LLMs, retrieval and agent orchestration to APIs, data pipelines, evaluations, observability, and production infrastructure.This is a deeply hands-on engineering role. You will write production code, prototype emerging approaches, contribute to technical designs, and take AI capabilities from experimentation through deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement. You will collaborate with engineers across teams to integrate AI models and intelligent services into existing production systems while meeting both technical and business requirements.As a Senior Engineer, you will provide technical guidance within the team, contribute to engineering standards and reusable patterns, mentor junior engineers, and help foster a culture of engineering excellence and innovation. You will apply advanced expertise in AI engineering while continuing to develop breadth across adjacent technical domains.You will partner closely with Product, Design, Data, Information Security, Risk, Compliance, and other engineering teams to translate business and customer needs into responsible, scalable AI solutions.TECHNICAL ENVIRONMENT:We do not hire against a narrow technology checklist. We are looking for engineers with strong software engineering fundamentals who are excited about solving difficult problems at the intersection of AI, distributed systems, and customer-facing products.CORE ENGINEERING STACK:• Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes• Tools and Platform: LangGraph, LangChain, Docker• APIs and services: REST, gRPC• Distributed systems: event-driven architectures, including Kafka• Data processing technologies and frameworks for large-scale data pipelinesAGENTIC AI AND ML:• Commercial and open-source LLMs integrated into production applications and agentic workflows• Tooling for agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, vector storage, and evaluation• Prompt engineering, context management, structured generation, and model evaluation• Machine learning and natural language processing techniques, including Transformer-based models and their real-world applications• Schema validation and structured data handling• Machine learning operations tooling for model deployment, monitoring, and maintenanceAI-ASSISTED DEVELOPMENT:• Use of AI-assisted and agentic development tools for design, implementation, testing, debugging, and refactoring• Learning how to apply these tools responsibly while maintaining production-quality standards• All systems are built to meet high standards for reliability, security, and auditability, reflecting the responsibility of deploying autonomous AI in a financial services environmentResponsibilitiesDesign, build, and operate scalable production AI systems integrating ML models, LLMs, retrieval systems, and intelligent services. Develop core GenAI and agentic capabilities, including RAG, agent/workflow orchestration, tool integrations, context management, structured outputs, and evaluation frameworks. Integrate AI capabilities into existing production systems, partnering across engineering teams to meet technical, product, and business requirements. Own the end-to-end production lifecycle of AI capabilities, including implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, evaluation, maintenance, and continuous improvement. Build robust AI evaluation and safety mechanisms, including offline evaluation, regression testing, task-success measurement, model/prompt comparison, guardrails, permissions, validation, and graceful failure/recovery. Design for production-scale requirements, including latency, throughput, availability, scalability, security, observability, cost, model variability, and failure modes. Translate customer, restaurant, and business needs into AI solutions, partnering with Product, Design, Data, and business teams to identify high-value applications across dining discovery, reservations, hospitality workflows, and servicing. Evaluate emerging models, frameworks, and AI technologies and help determine appropriate technical approaches for Global Dining. Establish reusable AI engineering patterns and standards, including reference implementations and best practices for LLM and agentic systems. Provide technical leadership and mentorship through architecture/design reviews, code reviews, hands-on collaboration, and guidance to other engineers.QualificationsBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, Computer Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience; advanced degree preferred.Significant software engineering experience building and operating production AI/ML systems, including generative AI, LLM applications, or agentic systems.Strong proficiency in Python and experience with one or more additional languages such as Go, TypeScript, or Java.Strong understanding of modern AI architectures and techniques, including LLMs, NLP, retrieval/RAG, tool calling, structured generation, context management, orchestration, and evaluation.Experience integrating commercial or open-source LLMs into real-world applications.Experience designing scalable, distributed, API-driven systems and production services, with strong knowledge of reliability, latency, security, observability, cost, and performance optimization.Experience building data pipelines and ETL processes using Spark, Hadoop, or comparable modern data-processing frameworks.Experience deploying and operating AI models and pipelines using MLOps, CI/CD, and containerized infrastructure.Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of production systems, from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.Ability to navigate ambiguous technical problems, make pragmatic engineering decisions, and translate emerging AI capabilities into reliable customer experiences.Experience mentoring engineers and improving engineering quality through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and hands-on collaboration.Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to translate business requirements and complex technical concepts for technical and non-technical audiences.Deep expertise in at least one technical domain, with the ability to develop expertise across adjacent areas.Strong customer mindset and interest in applying AI to meaningful real-world experiences.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 positionsAbout the TeamAt 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.