Staff Engineer | burgess hill, west sussex, UK

American Express; Burgess Hill; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job description

Staff Engineer

American Express, Burgess Hill, West Sussex, United Kingdom

You Lead the Way. We've Got Your Back.

With the right backing, people and businesses have the power to progress in incredible ways. When you join Team Amex, you become part of a global and diverse community of colleagues with an unwavering commitment to back our customers, communities, and each other. Here, you'll learn and grow as we help you create a career journey that's unique and meaningful to you with benefits, programs, and flexibility that support you personally and professionally.

At American Express, you'll be recognized for your contributions, leadership, and impact—every colleague has the opportunity to share in the company's success. Together, we'll win as a team, striving to uphold our company values and powerful backing promise to provide the world's best customer experience every day. And we'll do it with the utmost integrity, and in an environment where everyone is seen, heard, and feels like they belong.

Join Team Amex and let's lead the way together.

Global Infrastructure

The Global Infrastructure (GI) organization is a large, globally dispersed and diverse team. Its mission is dedicated to delighting our customers through an intuitive and modern self-service infrastructure that allows for secure, stable, and scalable platforms with appropriate efficiency and innovation. GI is looking to help raise its bar for technical excellence and so this role will be dedicated to ensuring consistency and enterprise-wide collaboration on how we build and modernize technology, focused within the Infrastructure tower. This role will seek to cultivate and foster technical innovation and strategy as part of the ability to deliver great experiences to all American Express colleagues.

In this role, you will report to our GI Head Engineer to act as "Developer Zero" - a hands-on senior Infrastructure Developer who consumes our client-facing APIs, builds and manipulates infrastructure, and deploys test applications on top of that infrastructure - just as our AppDev partners do. The role will, in one direction, provide direct feedback to the GI Engineers on areas for optimization and improvement on behalf of our clients, and in the other direction, provide guidance to our clients on how best to consume our GI product offerings.

As "Developer Zero", you will be essential in helping to uplift our enterprise-wide infrastructure services to ensure high levels of product availability for the customers and partners of American Express. This role is critical in the delivery of functions to service the full stack of Amex enterprise solutions.

Some of the problems we'll work on include:

• Testing new GI software components and APIs. Partnering with the GI Engineers to improve and optimize the developer experience for Amex applications running on our infrastructure.
• Building and operating synthetic applications that can be used to stress test our infrastructure from multiple dimensions (resiliency, security, performance, etc.)
• Partnering with our Engineering teams to integrate Infrastructure services and platforms with our CI/CD platforms - improving our internal SDLC process, automated test cases, and delivering fast time to value.
• Working to ensure reliability of compute and data partitioned across geographically distributed data centers - both in and out of the public cloud.
• Directly contribute to the design and coding of our software systems, serving as a role model for how great software is built at Amex.
• Helping to design and construct systems that are secure, reliable, scalable, and extensible.
• Help drive sound technical decisions utilizing the advice of teammates and contribute to technical conversations with other engineering teams.
• Mentor junior team members across the organization and assist with projects that develop their skills.

In this role you will:

• Work closely with the GI Head Engineer, EVP of Global Infrastructure, and other senior engineers across the organization to find opportunities to improve engineering quality across American Express - both from an infrastructure perspective and from an AppDev perspective.
• Contribute to the Foundational Technology pillar of the Tech Strategy.
• Drive architectural design and engineering best practices throughout the GI organization.
• Instill accountability across GI for building solutions in alignment with Technology policies, standards, and development best practices.

Minimum Qualifications

• At least 10 years of experience with Technology strategy and large-scale program delivery.
• Strong and diverse technical background - ideally an Infrastructure Developer.
• You have contributed to the design and build of cloud-native applications written in Java or Go.
• You have done "DevOps" work, such as building CI/CD pipelines or setting up cloud hosting environments.
• Extensive experience in infrastructure products. This may include network, compute, storage, database, midrange, mainframe, observability with a strong focus and practical experience in using both public & private cloud.
• You have experience mentoring more junior engineers, helping them to succeed and grow in their roles.
• You build effective work relationships, giving and receiving constructive feedback, and your colleagues at all levels and across all teams trust you.
• You can break down platform silos, evaluate from all perspectives, and put enterprise thinking first.
• Experience implementing SDLC in a controlled or regulated environment.
• Strong influencing and negotiation skills.
• Exceptional stakeholder management skills, including at the senior level.
• Excellent written, interpersonal, and presentation communications.
• Experience working in a matrixed organization and influencing people at all levels.
• Demonstrated leadership and management experience in working with cross-functional, geographically dispersed teams on complex projects.
• Brings support and positive attributes to a culture that is respectful, supportive, goal-oriented, and diverse.

Technologies we use at Amex include:

• Infrastructure components are based around VMware, IP networks and SDN, SAN and NAS fabrics, and OpenShift. Experience using public cloud services is crucial.
• Go and Java are our primary server languages - familiarity in at least one language will be beneficial.
• Code lives in GitHub Enterprise and flows to production through a CI/CD pipeline built on GitHub Actions.
• Code runs in Kubernetes-managed Docker containers hosted in a mix of private and public clouds.
• Other key tech includes GraphQL, gRPC, Kafka, Postgres, Couchbase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Redis, OpenTracing, Jaeger, Prometheus, and Grafana.

American Express is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, age, or any other status protected by law.

Benefits

We back our colleagues and their loved ones with benefits and programs that support their holistic well-being. That means we prioritize their physical, financial, and mental health through each stage of life. Benefits include:

• Competitive base salaries
• Bonus incentives
• Support for financial well-being and retirement
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits (depending on location)
• Flexible working model with hybrid, onsite, or virtual arrangements depending on role and business need
• Generous paid parental leave policies (depending on your location)
• Free access to global on-site wellness centers staffed with nurses and doctors (depending on location)
• Free and confidential counseling support through our Healthy Minds program
• Career development and training opportunities

Offer of employment with American Express is conditioned upon the successful completion of a background verification check, subject to applicable laws and regulations.