AI Engineer III - Agentic - Travel & Lifestyle Services

Job ID: 26013110Posted: 2026-09-08Location: Phoenix, AZ, United StatesSalary: $103750 - $174750 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 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 U.S. Consumer Services and Membership Digital Experiences Technology team (USCDT) brings together foundational strategic technology capabilities in digital experience engineering (Mobile and Web), marketing and advertising technology, enterprise communications, travel and lifestyle, and dining technology. It employs a ground-breaking focus with development responsibilities for customer-facing capabilities that deepen and expand digital engagement, as well as core technical capabilities that cut across business lines and customer segments. ​The Travel & Lifestyle Services (TLS) product portfolio supports travel, fulfilment and concierge services across multiple channels 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We deliver at a rapid pace, driving high quality engineering outcomes to support thousands of customer services professionals and millions of card members worldwide.​The TLS Technology team delivers the technologies needed to power these experiences enjoyed by our card members. We are tasked with designing, building and integrating the appropriate technical, architectural and business solutions for all online/web products enterprise-wide applications for TLS products within American Express.​ Overall, this team is critical in ensuring timely delivery of new functions and capabilities, safeguarding technical excellence, ensuring the appropriate tradeoff between long-term technical excellence versus time-to-market, etc..​At American Express, AI is reshaping the future of commerce and redefining the experiences our commercial customers and card members expect. Within Amex Technology, we are building platforms, products, and governance that enable agentic AI systems to operate responsibly and at scale across the enterprise.Our focus is on agentic AI development: designing intelligent, adaptive systems that can plan, reason, and act across complex workflows with appropriate levels of autonomy. These systems power autonomous workflows, decision support, and customer-facing experiences—while meeting the high standards for security, explainability, reliability, and compliance required in financial services.We partner closely with product, design, and business teams to deliver agentic capabilities that reduce operational friction, improve decision-making, and transform how customers interact, transact, and grow.The RoleAs an AI Engineer III – Agentic AI, you will be a hands-on builder contributing to the development of production agentic AI systems that operate on real financial data and serve real customers.You will work alongside experienced engineers, product managers, and designers to design, build, and ship AI-powered features, while learning how to operate within a regulated, customer-facing environment. This role offers strong mentorship and opportunities to grow your technical depth in LLMs, agentic systems, and production AI engineering.This is not a research-only role. You will write production code, contribute to system design discussions, and help operate what you build after launch, with support and guidance from more senior engineers. ResponsibilitiesWhat You’ll DoContribute to the design and implementation of LLM-powered and agentic product features.Build and extend agentic AI workflows that reason over context, call tools, and perform actions under guidance from senior engineers.Help implement and maintain retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines over financial data, with an emphasis on correctness and safety.Contribute to shared AI infrastructure such as LLM services, orchestration components, and evaluation or monitoring tooling.Participate in operating AI systems in production, including monitoring, debugging, and improving reliability and performance.Collaborate closely with product and design partners, learning to translate customer needs into technical solutions.Technical EnvironmentWe don’t hire to a narrow checklist, but candidates should be excited to grow in a modern, enterprise-scale engineering environment with a focus on agentic AI.Core engineering stackLanguages: Python, Go, TypeScriptCloud and infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, KubernetesAPIs and services: REST, gRPCDistributed systems: event-driven architectures, including KafkaAgentic AI and ML Commercial and open-source LLMs integrated into agentic workflowsTooling for agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, vector storage, and evaluationSchema validation and structured data handlingAI-assisted developmentUse of AI-assisted and agentic development tools for design, implementation, testing, debugging, and refactoringLearning how to apply these tools responsibly while maintaining production-quality standardsAll systems are built to meet high standards for reliability, security, and auditability, reflecting the responsibility of deploying autonomous AI in a financial services environment.Qualifications4+ years of professional software engineering experience.Some hands-on experience building or contributing to AI-powered features, LLM-based applications, or applied ML systems (professional or project-based).Solid engineering fundamentals in at least one backend language (Python, Go, or TypeScript).Familiarity with APIs, basic cloud concepts, and modern development practices.Interest in agentic AI systems, autonomy, and AI-assisted development workflows.Willingness to learn, take feedback, and grow technical ownership over time.Comfort working in collaborative, cross-functional teams.A strong customer mindset and curiosity about real-world problem solving.Preferred QualificationsExposure to LLM tooling, prompt engineering, RAG, or agent frameworks through work, coursework, or personal projects.Internship or early-career experience in fintech or other regulated environments.Contributions to open-source projects, hackathons, or side projects related to AI or developer tooling.Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.​