AI Engineer III - Forward Deployed Engineer - Enterprise AI Platforms

American Express is seeking a Forward Deployed AI Engineer (AI Engineer III) to collaborate with business, product, and engineering teams. The role focuses on identifying and reframing high-value opportunities and delivering trusted, secure, and responsible generative AI solutions from early discovery through production scaling and adoption.

Key Responsibilities

• Work closely with business units, product teams, and engineering organizations to identify and reframe high-value opportunities, translate business challenges into clear value propositions, and build working solutions using Generative AI, agentic systems, and intelligent automation.
• Advance opportunities from discovery and demonstration through proof of value, production scaling, adoption, and transition to long-term ownership.
• Drive credible opportunities into sustained adoption by connecting each stage to measurable outcomes and aligning with enterprise requirements for security, reliability, and responsible AI.
• Influence without direct authority by communicating across seniority levels and technical familiarity while partnering with engineers to build and deploy reliable software.
• Challenge assumptions about how work is performed by analyzing processes as systems and identifying technical, operational, and organizational levers to improve them.
• Define a longer-term direction and sequence practical near-term solutions that build toward that direction.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience delivering software, technical solutions, or digital products in an engineering, architecture, or technical consulting capacity.
• Proven ability to take an ambiguous business or user problem through discovery, implementation, and measurable validation.
• Experience using coding agents in a structured engineering workflow, including specification-driven development, context management, iterative implementation, and reusable knowledge repositories.
• Software engineering fluency with the ability to contribute directly to applications, integrations, services, or technical prototypes.
• Experience in at least one relevant domain such as mobile, web, backend services, APIs, distributed systems, platform engineering, workflow orchestration, or cloud-native development.
• Strong end-to-end systems reasoning, including identifying constraints and leverage points and connecting technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-partnership skills, including explaining technical concepts, constructively challenging approaches, and influencing without direct authority.
• Ability to define a longer-term direction and sequence incremental solutions that build toward it.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required; the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.

Technologies

• Generative AI
• Agentic systems
• Intelligent automation
• Retrieval-augmented generation
• Vector databases
• Tool calling
• Model context protocols
• Knowledge retrieval
• Temporal
• LangGraph
• LangChain
• LlamaIndex

Success Measures

• AI opportunities progressing from discovery to proof of value and, when appropriate, to production adoption.
• Measurable business outcomes tied to clearly defined KPIs.
• Ability to identify and reframe valuable opportunities while linking near-term delivery to longer-term transformation.
• Solutions that improve the broader workflow and are adopted into sustainable operating models.
• Strong stakeholder relationships, technical quality, and effective management of security, risk, and reliability.
• Reusable capabilities and implementation patterns incorporated into the enterprise AI platform.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or deploying solutions powered by language models, agentic systems, or AI-enabled process flows.
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, tool calling, model context protocols, knowledge retrieval, or workflow technologies such as Temporal, LangGraph, LangChain, or LlamaIndex.
• Experience designing human-in-the-loop controls and operational safeguards, including knowledge of AI evaluation, observability, and responsible AI.
• Experience supporting technology adoption or operating-model transformation, particularly in financial services or another regulated industry.

Working Model and Travel

• Occasional travel may be required for workshops or key delivery milestones; frequent travel is not expected.
• Roles may be based near selected American Express offices to support close partnerships with regional business and product teams.
• AMEX Flex (Enterprise Working Model): colleagues may work onsite, in a hybrid model (a combination of in-office and virtual days), or fully virtually depending on role and business needs.

Compensation and Location

Location: New York, NY (onsite).
Salary: USD 103,750 - 174,750 per year.

Benefits

• Competitive base salaries
• 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, offered for pregnancy, adoption or surrogacy
• Free access to global on-site wellness centers staffed with nurses and doctors (depending on location)
• Free and confidential counseling support through the Healthy Minds program
• Career development and training opportunities

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.