Senior Associate - Technology Operations Engineering
Employer not yet confirmed · Phoenix, Arizona, United States · hybrid
Enterprise Identity Application Support
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.
Enterprise Identity is the foundation of American Express's digital customer experience, enabling secure, seamless, and reliable authentication and authorization services.
The Enterprise Identity Application Support (AS) team partners with Product, Engineering, SRE, and Program teams to ensure the availability, performance, and resilience of mission-critical Identity and Access Management (IAM) platforms.
These capabilities include American Express Logon, OAuth-based authorization for Open Banking, customer identity systems such as Product Registry and Profile, and authentication services including One Auth, AuthN+, and Verification Services.
Supporting high-availability objectives of up to 99.999%, the team operates 24x7x365 through a global follow-the-sun model spanning the United States and India.
How Will You Make an Impact in This Role?
You will play a critical role in maintaining the reliability, stability, and performance of Enterprise Identity applications supporting millions of customer interactions.
This hands-on technical role focuses on production support, incident resolution, application troubleshooting, observability, automation, and continuous reliability improvements.
You will collaborate with engineering and SRE teams to proactively identify production risks, resolve complex technical issues, reduce incident recovery times, and improve platform resilience through engineering-driven solutions.
Key Responsibilities
Production Support & Incident Management
- Provide 24x7 production support for mission-critical Enterprise Identity applications and services.
- Proactively monitor application health, investigate alerts, and troubleshoot complex production issues involving APIs, microservices, authentication services, and infrastructure.
- Participate in high-severity incident response, technical troubleshooting, and service recovery activities.
- Perform root cause analysis (RCA), identify recurring issues, and implement corrective and preventive solutions.
- Support critical incident escalations, collaborate with stakeholders, and communicate technical findings and resolution progress.
- Leverage AI-assisted diagnostics and automated incident workflows to accelerate troubleshooting and resolution.
Application Reliability & Observability
- Partner with Engineering and SRE teams to improve application availability, performance, scalability, and resilience.
- Analyze application logs, metrics, and distributed traces to identify performance bottlenecks and system failures.
- Utilize observability platforms such as Splunk, ELK Stack, Dynatrace, Grafana, and Prometheus.
- Enhance proactive monitoring, intelligent alerting, and automated diagnostics to reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Restore/Recover (MTTR).
- Participate in disaster recovery testing, resilience validation, and preventive maintenance activities.
Agentic AI, Automation & Technical Engineering
- Design, develop, and maintain automation solutions using Python, Java, Unix Shell, Ansible, APIs, and orchestration frameworks.
- Explore and implement Agentic AI solutions and AI-powered workflows to enhance incident triage, root cause analysis, operational decision-making, and automated remediation.
- Leverage AIOps, machine learning, and intelligent automation for anomaly detection, event correlation, predictive monitoring, and proactive incident prevention.
- Develop automated diagnostics, self-healing workflows, and reusable operational tools to reduce manual intervention and operational toil.
- Integrate AI-driven automation with observability platforms, incident management systems, and operational workflows, incorporating appropriate human oversight and security controls.
- Troubleshoot Java-based applications, REST APIs, microservices, and cloud-native workloads deployed on OpenShift, Kubernetes, or equivalent platforms.
- Collaborate with development teams on application defects, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and production readiness.
Collaboration & Continuous Improvement
- Collaborate with Product, Engineering, SRE, Cybersecurity, and Delivery teams to ensure reliable and secure production operations.
- Participate in technical retrospectives, post-implementation reviews, and continuous service improvement initiatives.
- Support incident, problem, change, and release management processes aligned with ITSM practices.
- Contribute to operational knowledge repositories, automation frameworks, and engineering best practices.
- Identify opportunities to adopt emerging AI technologies, Agentic AI capabilities, and automation solutions to improve engineering productivity and operational efficiency.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 3+ years of experience in application support, production engineering, site reliability engineering, or software engineering.
- Strong hands-on experience troubleshooting enterprise applications, resolving production incidents, and performing root cause analysis.
- Proficiency in programming or scripting languages such as Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, or Unix Shell.
- Working knowledge of Java-based applications, Spring frameworks, REST APIs, JSON, and microservices architectures.
- Familiarity with web technologies such as JavaScript, HTML5, and Node.js.
- Hands-on experience with observability and application performance monitoring tools such as Splunk, ELK Stack, Dynatrace, or equivalent platforms.
- Experience designing, developing, and implementing operational automation using Python, Shell scripting, Ansible, APIs, or orchestration frameworks.
- Working knowledge of AIOps concepts, including intelligent alerting, anomaly detection, event correlation, and automated incident management.
- Experience automating production support activities, including monitoring, diagnostics, incident triage, and remediation workflows.
- Experience supporting applications on OpenShift, Kubernetes, or other cloud platforms.
- Familiarity with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins and GitHub.
- Understanding of ITSM concepts, Agile methodologies, and tools such as Jira.
- Strong analytical, troubleshooting, communication, and collaboration skills.
- Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, business-critical production environment.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience supporting Identity and Access Management (IAM), authentication, authorization, or cybersecurity applications.
- Knowledge of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), JSON Web Tokens (JWT), and API security concepts.
- Experience supporting highly available, large-scale distributed applications and microservices.
- Understanding of SRE principles, including Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and reliability metrics.
- Experience with advanced observability technologies such as Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and distributed tracing.
- Hands-on experience implementing AIOps solutions for anomaly detection, predictive monitoring, intelligent event correlation, and automated incident resolution.
- Exposure to Agentic AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), and AI-powered automation frameworks for incident triage, root cause analysis, and operational workflows.
- Experience developing self-healing automation, automated remediation, and AI-assisted diagnostic solutions with appropriate operational safeguards.
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