Manager - Technical Project Management

The Global Merchant and Network Services Technology (GMNST) organization at American Express is responsible for modernizing the payments network to enable next-generation payments products. The team creates flexible merchant platforms to acquire, bill, pay, service and foster innovation, while enabling a payments ecosystem to connect and authenticate parties seamlessly and securely.

American Express is making strategic investments in new card network products and platforms to allow the company to meet its ambitious global growth agenda. Card Network platform is a distributed near real time low latency system that is always available and highly resilient, processing transactions from around the world 24x7, 365 days a year. American Express Global Card Network Platform authorizes and processes all of the company’s customer card transactions.

American Express is seeking a Agile Champion for the Global Network technology team. This role requires the strong communication skills and the ability to translate business objectives into an execution strategy while resolving and tracking program risks, dependencies, and impediments to project delivery.

How will you make an impact in this role?

As a Technical Project Manager on our diverse tech team, you will lead cross-functional project and program teams and work with internal customers to establish and interpret project/program objectives into solutions. This role will collaborate closely with Product, Engineers, Architects, Leadership, and other key partners, to ensure completeness and efficiency of solutions while ensuring alignment to standards. Delivering value-based outcomes using Agile practices and processes is key to this role, equally important is the ability to understand the products and functionality in support of platforms within Technology. 

In this role you will actively drive processes and execution as part of the GMNST. Directly support and lead engineering teams’ agility by demonstrating Agile/Scrum concepts and principles to support successful business outcomes. 

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Ownership multiple delivery plans across technology remediation, modernization and innovation and manage dependencies across workstream
  
• Facilitate and lead technical conversations (e.g., relating to architectural approach and system design) and documents solutions.
  
• Drive team/release level processes demonstrating servant leadership coupled with domain knowledge and technical acumen.
  
• Facilitate Sprint planning meetings and other Scrum ceremonies with delivery team.
  
• Ensures dependency alignment across teams.
  
• Execute the Program Increment (PI) objectives to support the strategy, vision, and road map
  
• Ensure value is achieved by the team on behalf of end users.
  
• Work in partnership with Product Owners and the core and extended team to build and prioritize the product backlog.
  
• Support product owners by ensuring backlog refinement and readiness.
  
• Collaborate with other Technical Project Managers (TPM) to coordinate cross-team dependencies and other teams within the organization.
  
• Create metrics driven insights into the delivery and execution of the team using relevant team level metrics.
  
• Responsible for tracking iteration progress, actively adding to design discussions, issue resolution, and removing obstacles to ensure sprint/iteration commitments are met.
  
• Support and encourage innovation through continuous exploration.
  
• Drive Agile team objectives.
  
• Provide visibility into gaps, issues, risks, and opportunities across Agile teams.
  
• Measure user story execution
  
• Coach teams to embrace the Technology SDLC process, Agile values, principles, and practices, and actively inspire teams to reflect and improve their delivery capacity
  

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in technology related subject area or equivalent experience required.
  
• 8+ years of technical project management experience.
  
• Excellent stakeholder management, being able to manage stakeholders across the board.
  
• Experience leading Agile, Scrum, or other rapid application development teams to deliver technology solutions that meet customer expectations for timeliness and quality 
  
• Experience in clarifying objectives, dealing with ambiguity/under-defined problems, advocating for simplification, and influencing 
  
• Excellent oral and written skills; Ability to efficiently communicate across product, technology, and business partners 
  
• Ability to deliver complex software iteratively and with quality 
  
• Experience using Rally delivery management platform is required 
  
• Deep understanding of Agile at Scale or iterative development processes, including quality and testing standard practices 
  
• Experience managing multiple initiatives, priorities, and teams.
  
• PMI Certification is a plus.
  
• Scrum Master Certification is a plus.
  

• 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