Senior AI Engineer II - Forward Deployed Engineer - Enterprise AI Platforms

American Express is seeking a Senior AI Engineer II to serve as a Forward Deployed Engineer supporting enterprise AI platform initiatives. In this onsite role in New York, NY, you will work closely with business and engineering teams to identify high-value use cases and take generative AI concepts through proof of value to adoption and long-term ownership, with emphasis on security, reliability, and responsible AI.

How You Will Contribute

• Partner with business units, product teams, and engineering organizations to identify and reframe high-value opportunities, translate business needs into value propositions, and deliver working solutions using generative AI, agentic systems, and intelligent automation.
• Move opportunities from discovery and demonstration through proof of value, production scaling, adoption, and transition to long-term ownership.
• Enable credible opportunities to progress into durable, measurable ways of working, balancing outcomes with enterprise requirements for security, reliability, and responsible AI.
• Influence stakeholders without direct authority, communicate across levels of technical familiarity, and work alongside 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 for improvement.
• Define longer-term technical direction while sequencing practical near-term solutions that build toward that direction.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience delivering software, technical solutions, or digital products in an engineering, architecture, or technical consulting capacity.
• Demonstrated ability to take an ambiguous business or user problem from discovery through implementation to 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: mobile, web, backend services, APIs, distributed systems, platform engineering, workflow orchestration, or cloud-native development.
• Ability to reason about systems end to end, identify constraints and leverage points, and link technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Strong communication and stakeholder partnership skills, including the ability to explain technical concepts, challenge existing approaches constructively, and influence without direct authority.
• Ability to define 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 and Tools

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

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, with knowledge of AI evaluation, observability, and responsible AI.
• Experience supporting technology adoption or operating-model transformation, particularly in financial services or another regulated industry.

Success Metrics

• AI opportunities progress from discovery to proof of value and, where appropriate, production adoption.
• Measurable business outcomes tied to clearly defined KPIs.
• Ability to identify and reframe valuable opportunities while connecting near-term delivery to longer-term transformation.
• Solutions improve broader workflows 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.

Compensation

Salary range: USD 123,000 to 215,250 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

Working Model and Travel

• Occasional travel may be required for workshops or key delivery milestones, but frequent travel is not expected.
• Roles may be based near selected American Express offices to support close partnerships with regional business and product teams.