Senior Software Engineer, Digital Banking & Payments

Joining 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 Digital Banking & Payments organization is building the next generation of banking and payment capabilities that power customer experiences across American Express. Our platform enables teams to launch and scale financial products while supporting critical money movement, payment processing, settlement, reconciliation, and data services. We are seeking engineers who are passionate about solving complex business problems through innovation, engineering excellence, and modern data practices. As a Senior Mainframe & Data Engineer, you will help evolve core transaction processing and data platforms that operate at enterprise scale while enabling greater agility, real-time processing, and integration across the Digital Banking ecosystem. You will partner closely with product, engineering, and operations teams to deliver resilient, scalable, and high-performing solutions. We embrace a culture of experimentation, continuous learning, and collaboration, and welcome individuals who challenge assumptions and drive meaningful improvements. Responsibilities: Enhance payment processing applications and data platforms across mainframe and distributed environments. Build scalable capabilities supporting money movement, clearing, settlement, reconciliation, and reporting. Enable platform modernization through APIs, event-driven architectures, and enterprise data integration. Deliver batch and real-time processing solutions for high-volume transaction workloads. Partner with business and product teams to understand data requirements and define scalable data architectures. Maintain and improve data pipelines, application frameworks, and supporting services. Contribute as a core member of an Agile team through story refinement, technical design, implementation, testing, and deployment. Improve platform performance, data quality, resiliency, and operational efficiency. Advance observability, automation, and service reliability practices. Participate in technical reviews and drive engineering best practices. Support production environments through troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement. Qualifications – Required Extensive experience working in IBM z/OS environments. Strong proficiency with COBOL, JCL, DB2, CICS, IMS, VSAM, or related mainframe technologies. Experience supporting high-volume transaction processing systems within banking, payments, financial services, or other regulated industries. Strong understanding of data engineering concepts including ingestion, transformation, quality, metadata management, and lineage. Experience with batch and real-time data processing patterns. Experience with relational databases such as DB2, Oracle, PostgreSQL, or equivalent platforms. Experience integrating mainframe applications with distributed systems using APIs, messaging platforms, or event-driven architectures. Working knowledge of Kafka, IBM MQ, or similar messaging technologies. Understanding of banking and payments domains including money movement, ACH, settlement, reconciliation, or ISO20022 messaging standards. Experience supporting highly available, mission-critical platforms with demanding service-level objectives. Strong analytical, problem-solving, and troubleshooting skills. Excellent written and verbal communication skills. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent work experience. Qualifications – Preferred Experience with Python and object-oriented programming concepts. Experience with PySpark, Spark SQL, distributed data processing, and large-scale data platforms. Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, Hadoop, or similar analytics platforms. Familiarity with data governance and metadata management tools. Experience with REST APIs and API specifications. Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, containerization technologies, and cloud platforms. Experience with real-time event ingestion and streaming architectures. Knowledge of Digital Banking products and payment ecosystems including ACH, Zelle, account funding, and related money movement capabilities. Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.