Staff Engineer - DataOps engineering, Python, API
American Express
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Join Team Amex and let's lead the way together.
As part of our diverse tech team, you can architect, code and ship software that makes us an essential part of our customers’ digital lives. Here, you can work alongside talented engineers in an open, supportive, inclusive environment where your voice is valued, and you make your own decisions on what tech to use to solve challenging problems. American Express offers a range of opportunities to work with the latest technologies and encourages you to back the broader engineering community through open source. And because we understand the importance of keeping your skills fresh and relevant, we give you dedicated time to invest in your professional development. Find your place in technology on #TeamAmex.
How will you make an impact in this role?
The Infrastructure Data & Analytics team unifies FinOps, Data Science and Business Intelligence to enable Technology cost transparency, infrastructure performance optimization and commercial efficiency for the enterprise through consistent, high-quality data and predictive analytics. This team within Global Infrastructure aims to establish and reinforce a culture of effective metrics, data-driven business processes, architecture simplification, and cost awareness. Metric-driven cost optimization, workload-specific forecasting and robust contract management are among the tools and practices required to drive accountability for delivering business solutions that derive maximum value. The result will provide a solid foundation for decision-making around cost, quality and speed.
We are seeking a visionary leader to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our organization by leading the development and implementation of our target state data architecture. This experienced Staff Engineer will be responsible for leading the design, development, and enhancement of our data model and architecture. The Staff Engineer will lead a team that will set the foundation for how infrastructure utilization, consumption and asset inventory data is ingested, validated, and presented in our suite of reporting capabilities. They will be responsible for ensuring our data feeds and processes are automated wherever possible and data quality (data accuracy, completeness, timeliness, consistency, uniqueness and relevance) is meeting the highest standards. This individual will partner across ID&A and Global Infrastructure product teams to aggregate and provide consistent data to users, leverage best practices for data management, and set expectations on how downstream systems should access different types of data.
Let’s build on what you know.
This role will require a unique blend of strategic vision, analytical prowess, and effective stakeholder engagement to deliver high-quality data consistently and efficiently to drive decision-making for our business and technology stakeholders. This individual will build a deep understanding of the infrastructure data we use in order to work across the ID&A team and key stakeholders the appropriate data to tell a data story. This includes implementing and maintaining a data architecture that follows data management best practices for ensuring data ingestion, transformation, storage and analytics are handled according to their specific purpose using the appropriate tools: ingestion captures raw data without applying business logic, transformation processes data discretely for auditability, and analytical queries retrieve structured outputs without relying on upstream processes. The Sr. Staff Engineer will also play a critical role in architecting the target state for our broader Infrastructure data domain in partnership with our Head Engineer and Enterprise Architecture. They will bring passion for data-driven decisions, enterprise solutions, and collaboration to the role, transforming platform data into actionable insights by utilizing data engineering and data visualization best practices.
Key responsibilities include:
- Data Architecture: Function as steward and owner of ID&A’s data lake, including developing data pipelines, new database structures and APIs as applicable
- Data Design: Translate logical data architectures into physical data designs, ensuring alignment with data modeling best practices and standards
- Data Process and Monitoring: Ensure proper data ingestion, validation, testing, and monitoring for ID&A data lake
- Data Migration: Design and support migration to a data model that is independent of the particular technologies or tools used for storing, processing, or accessing the data
- Data Integrity: Ensure the accuracy, completeness, and quality of data is maintained over time regardless of upstream systems or downstream
- Agile Methodologies: Lead an agile feature team and manage data assets as per the enterprise standards, guidelines and policies
- Partner closely with business intelligence team to capture and define data requirements for new and enhanced data visualizations
- Work with product teams to prioritize new capabilities and data requirements for ongoing sprints and manage backlog
- Enterprise Thinking: Partner with data architects and engineers across Global Infrastructure and Asset Management teams to evolve the broader tech operations data architecture landscape
- Enforce SDLC standards, enterprise reuse, and architecture guidelines and participate in any required Architecture Design Reviews
- Act as point of contact for data-related inquiries and data access requests
- Contribute to decisions about tools, methods and approaches
- Innovation: Leverage the evolving technical landscape as needed, including AI, Big Data, Machine Learning and other technologies to deliver meaningful business insights
- 10+ years of DataOps engineering experience in implementing pipeline orchestration, data quality monitoring, governance, security processes, and self-service data access
- Deep technical understanding of event-driven architectures, API-first design, cloud-native technologies, and front-end integration patterns
- Extensive experience managing databases, ETL/ELT pipelines, data lake architectures, and real-time processing
- Hands-on coding experience in Python
- Hands-on expertise with design and development across one or more database management systems (e.g. SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle)
- Experience in designing and implementing data solutions with high resiliency, availability, and reliability
- Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional teams of Data Engineers, Data Architects, and Product-type roles
- Proven ability to translate business data requirements into complete, accurate, extensible, and flexible logical data models using data modeling tools
- Testing and Troubleshooting: Ability to test, troubleshoot, and debug data processes as needed
- Strong analytical skills with a proven ability to understand and document business data requirements in complete, accurate, extensible and flexible logical data models, data visualization tools (e.g. Apptio BI, PowerBI)
- Strong written and verbal communications, presentation skills, leadership, problem-solving and organizational skills
- Fluent in data risk, management, and compliance terminology and best practices
- Proven track record for managing large, complex ecosystems with multiple stakeholders
- Self-starter who is able to problem-solve effectively, organize and document processes, and prioritize feature with limited guidance
- An enterprise mindset that connects the dots across various requirements and the broader operations/infrastructure data architecture landscape
- Excellent influential and collaboration skills; ability to drive consensus and tangible outcomes, demonstrated by breaking down silos and fostering cross-team communication
- Understanding of complex software delivery including build, test, deployment, and operations; conversant in AI, Data Science, and Business Intelligence concepts and technology stack
- Experience working in technology business management, technology infrastructure or data visualization teams
- Experience in infrastructure products a plus; this may include network, compute, storage, database, midrange, mainframe, observability, and both public & private cloud
- Foundational Public Cloud (AWS, Google, Microsoft) certification; advanced Public Cloud certifications a plus
- Experience with design and coding across multiple platforms and languages a plus
- Bachelor’s Degree in computer science, computer science engineering, data engineering, or related field required; advanced degree preferred
We back you with benefits that support your holistic well-being so you can be and deliver your best. This means caring for you and your loved ones' physical, financial, and mental health, as well as providing the flexibility you need to thrive personally and professionally:
- 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
American Express is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status, age, or any other status protected by law.
Offer of employment with American Express is conditioned upon the successful completion of a background verification check, subject to applicable laws and regulations.