Senior Manager - Technology Project Management

At American Express, technology is at the heart of how we deliver exceptional experiences for our customers and colleagues. Our technology platforms operate at significant scale and require continued focus on reliability, resilience, security, and engineering excellence.

The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization is seeking an experienced Senior Technical Program Manager to lead complex, cross-functional engineering initiatives that strengthen the reliability, resilience, security, and operational maturity of critical technology platforms.

In this role, you will partner closely with SRE Directors and engineering teams to identify systemic technology risks, establish priorities, accelerate remediation, strengthen engineering foundations, and drive sustainable solutions across the technology ecosystem.

You will also help advance the use of automation and agentic AI to solve complex engineering and operational problems, partnering with engineering teams to move high-value use cases from problem identification and rapid experimentation through production adoption and enterprise scale.

This is not a traditional project management role. Success requires strong technical acumen, an engineering mindset, data-driven decision making, and the ability to influence outcomes across organizations without direct authority.

The Role

As a Senior Technical Program Manager within Site Reliability Engineering, you will lead a portfolio of strategic engineering initiatives spanning reliability, vulnerability remediation, technology risk reduction, engineering foundations, infrastructure modernization, automation, and AI-enabled engineering solutions.

You will work across SRE organizations to identify common engineering challenges, concentration of risk, systemic dependencies, and opportunities where shared platform capabilities or automation can solve problems at scale.

You will translate complex and sometimes ambiguous technical challenges into clear priorities and executable programs, establish measurable outcomes, remove cross-organizational barriers, and provide engineering and technology leaders with actionable insights into progress, risk, and investment priorities.

A critical part of the role is helping evolve the organization from issue-by-issue remediation toward systemic prevention through stronger engineering foundations, platform capabilities, automation, and secure- and reliable-by-default practices.

Responsibilities

Drive Enterprise Reliability & Technology Risk Programs

• Lead complex engineering programs spanning multiple SRE and technology organizations focused on reliability, resilience, security, and operational maturity.
• Partner with SRE Directors and engineering leaders to identify and prioritize systemic technology risks and engineering opportunities across their portfolios.
• Translate broad technical objectives into clear outcomes, execution strategies, milestones, ownership, dependencies, and success measures.
• Prioritize initiatives based on technical risk, customer and business impact, regulatory obligations, engineering capacity, effort, and strategic value.
• Drive initiatives from problem identification through remediation, validation, measurement, and sustainable closure.
• Identify recurring patterns across engineering organizations and advocate for shared or platform-level solutions where solving a problem once can benefit many teams.

Accelerate Vulnerability & Engineering Risk Remediation

• Drive cross-organizational efforts to reduce vulnerability exposure and other systemic technology risks across applications, infrastructure, cloud platforms, containers, operating systems, middleware, and software dependencies.
• Partner with SRE, Engineering, Infrastructure, and Security teams to establish risk-based remediation priorities based on severity, exploitability, asset criticality, exposure, business impact, and other relevant risk signals.
• Establish clear ownership and accountability for remediation while identifying and removing systemic blockers that contribute to aging risk.
• Use engineering data to identify trends, recurring vulnerabilities, risk concentrations, remediation bottlenecks, and opportunities for systemic intervention.
• Drive improvements that shift remediation earlier into engineering workflows and reduce reliance on recurring manual intervention.
• Identify opportunities for automated dependency upgrades, patching, infrastructure remediation, policy enforcement, validation, and self-service capabilities.
• Partner with engineering teams to reduce recurrence by addressing root causes rather than repeatedly remediating individual issues.

Strengthen Engineering Foundations

• Identify foundational engineering gaps that contribute to recurring reliability, security, lifecycle, or operational risk.
• Partner with engineering organizations to improve SDLC, CI/CD, infrastructure, dependency management, observability, deployment practices, and engineering automation.
• Drive initiatives that embed reliability, security, compliance, and operational readiness earlier into engineering workflows.
• Identify opportunities to standardize and simplify engineering practices through reusable platform capabilities and paved-road solutions.
• Promote secure-by-default and reliable-by-default engineering practices.
• Help engineering organizations transition from reactive remediation toward proactive risk prevention and continuous improvement.

Scale Automation, AI & Engineering Solutions

• Identify recurring engineering and operational activities that can be eliminated or significantly improved through automation.
• Partner with SRE and engineering teams to identify high-value use cases for AI-assisted and agentic engineering capabilities.
• Work with AI Engineering, Forward-Deployed Engineering (FDE), Platform Engineering, Security, and domain engineering teams to rapidly translate engineering problems into working solutions.
• Drive high-value use cases from problem discovery and requirements definition through prototype, evaluation, production readiness, adoption, and scale.
• Explore AI-enabled capabilities across vulnerability remediation, risk identification, operational diagnostics, root-cause analysis, incident response, knowledge discovery, and engineering workflow automation.
• Enable agentic workflows that can reason over engineering context, invoke approved tools, recommend actions, and, where appropriate, execute controlled actions with appropriate guardrails and human oversight.
• Define measurable outcomes for AI-enabled solutions, including engineering effort saved, remediation acceleration, reliability, accuracy, adoption, and risk reduction.
• Turn successful prototypes and FDE solutions into reusable patterns, automation, or platform capabilities that can scale across engineering organizations.
• Apply AI where it provides meaningful value while continuing to use deterministic automation where it is simpler, safer, and more effective.

Drive Data-Based Prioritization & Outcomes

• Establish data-driven mechanisms for identifying, prioritizing, and managing reliability, vulnerability, lifecycle, infrastructure, and operational risks.
• Define meaningful KPIs, OKRs, scorecards, and engineering metrics that measure technical outcomes and risk reduction rather than activity alone.
• Provide actionable visibility into vulnerability exposure, remediation aging and velocity, reliability, operational risk, automation, engineering efficiency, and AI-enabled outcomes.
• Analyze engineering data to identify systemic patterns, emerging risks, and opportunities requiring intervention.
• Help leaders make informed trade-offs when engineering demand exceeds available capacity.
• Translate technical data into recommendations that inform prioritization, engineering investment, and leadership decisions.
• Measure whether completed initiatives deliver sustainable improvements and adjust strategies when expected outcomes are not achieved.

Lead Through Influence

• Build trusted partnerships with SRE Directors, engineering leaders, SREs, software engineers, infrastructure engineers, security engineers, architects, and technical leaders.
• Develop sufficient technical depth to engage credibly in engineering discussions, understand architectural and operational trade-offs, and constructively challenge assumptions.
• Drive alignment across SRE, Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, Application Engineering, Information Security, Architecture, AI Engineering, and other technology organizations.
• Navigate competing priorities and facilitate decisions across teams with different objectives and constraints.
• Remove organizational and cross-team barriers while maintaining engineering ownership of technical solutions.
• Connect organizations facing similar problems and identify opportunities for shared engineering solutions.
• Influence senior technical and engineering leaders without direct authority.

Provide Leadership Visibility & Decision Support

• Translate complex engineering and technology-risk information into concise, decision-oriented communications for senior technology leadership.
• Provide clear visibility into risk, remediation progress, trends, systemic barriers, dependencies, and outcomes.
• Develop executive-level scorecards and narratives that connect technical issues to customer, business, regulatory, and operational impact.
• Surface emerging risks early and escalate with clear options, recommendations, and required decisions.
• Distinguish between immediate symptoms, systemic root causes, and sustainable engineering solutions.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role is measured by engineering outcomes and risk reduction, not simply program completion.

Examples include:

• Reduced vulnerability exposure and improved remediation cycle times.
• Reduction in aged and recurring vulnerabilities through sustainable engineering solutions.
• Measurable reduction in systemic reliability, resilience, security, and operational risks.
• Improved engineering foundations across SDLC, CI/CD, infrastructure, dependency management, and operational workflows.
• Increased automation of recurring remediation and operational activities.
• Reduced engineering toil and faster resolution of technology risks.
• Increased adoption of secure-by-default and reliable-by-default engineering practices.
• Earlier identification and resolution of systemic engineering blockers.
• Production adoption of high-value AI-enabled solutions with measurable engineering impact.
• Successful transition of targeted FDE solutions into reusable and scalable engineering capabilities.
• Better engineering prioritization and investment decisions through data and actionable insights.
• Stronger alignment and accountability across SRE and engineering organizations.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in technical program management, software engineering, infrastructure engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, or a related technical field, including experience leading complex cross-functional technology initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience leading large-scale technical programs across multiple engineering teams and organizations, from problem definition and prioritization through execution and measurable outcomes.
• Strong technical acumen across modern software and infrastructure engineering, including SDLC, CI/CD, cloud technologies, distributed systems, security, observability, and operational reliability.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with demonstrated ability to use engineering data, risk signals, and metrics to prioritize work and drive decisions.
• Proven ability to navigate ambiguity, manage cross-team dependencies, remove organizational barriers, and influence outcomes without direct authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical issues, trade-offs, and recommendations to engineering teams and senior leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Cloud Engineering, DevOps, Cybersecurity, or other large-scale technology organizations.
• Experience driving reliability, vulnerability remediation, technology risk reduction, infrastructure modernization, or engineering excellence initiatives at scale.
• Working knowledge of SRE practices including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, observability, incident management, resilience engineering, production readiness, and toil reduction.
• Understanding of vulnerability management, risk-based remediation, cloud-native infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, DevSecOps, CI/CD, and engineering automation.
• Experience identifying opportunities to replace recurring engineering or operational activities with automation, self-service, or scalable platform solutions.
• Familiarity with Generative AI, agentic AI, AI-assisted engineering, and intelligent automation, including experience partnering with AI, FDE, or engineering teams to move solutions from prototype through production adoption and scale.
• Experience operating within a large-scale, complex, or regulated technology environment.

Leadership Characteristics

• Demonstrates technical credibility and effectively engages with engineers, architects, and senior technology leaders.
• Creates clarity from ambiguity by translating complex problems into priorities, actionable plans, and measurable outcomes.
• Thinks systemically, identifying root causes and opportunities to solve recurring problems through engineering, automation, and scalable solutions.
• Influences without authority, building alignment and accountability across engineering and technology organizations.
• Applies strong judgment and data-driven decision making to balance technology risk, business impact, engineering capacity, and strategic priorities.
• Communicates complex technical issues, trade-offs, risks, and recommendations clearly across engineering and senior leadership audiences.

Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.