Senior Software Engineer I

At American Express, our culture is built on a 175-year history of innovation, shared values and Leadership Behaviors, and an unwavering commitment to back our customers, communities, and colleagues. As part of Team Amex, you'll experience this powerful backing with comprehensive support for your holistic well-being and many opportunities to learn new skills, develop as a leader, and grow your career.

Here, your voice and ideas matter, your work makes an impact, and together, you will help us define the future of American Express.

How will you make an impact in this role?

We are looking for a seasoned Contact Center Architect with strong domain experience in conversational AI systems. The Senior Engineer, Contact Center AI will design, build, deploy, and maintain AI/ML-powered capabilities for our contact center operations to improve automation, agent augmentation, self-service and customer satisfaction.

You will work cross-functionally with product, operations, data science, software engineering and QA to solve challenging problems around speech recognition, natural language understanding, dialog systems, routing, speech analytics and agent assist.

Roles & Responsibilities: -

• Architect, design and maintain global conversational AI components for contact center applications including IVR systems, virtual agents, chatbots, and real-time assist ensuring scalability, resilience, and high-quality customer experiences. 
• Contact Center Product knowledge like Google CCAAI, Amazon LEX, Genesys.


• Collaborate closely with business stakeholders, product owners and CX strategists to understand customer journeys, business objectives, and market trends, translating them into intuitive, human-centered conversational designs.
• Design and implement conversational flows and dialog management frameworks leveraging NLU/NLP models for intent classification, entity extraction, and context tracking, ensuring natural and context-aware interactions.
• Lead the development of speech-related modules such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, voice biometrics, and speaker separation, optimizing for accuracy, latency, and noise robustness.
• Integrate AI-driven components with core contact center platforms (ACD, CTI, CRM, and telephony interfaces), ensuring seamless interoperability and end-to-end performance.
• Partner with data science and data engineering teams to build scalable data pipelines, manage model lifecycle (training, labeling, versioning), and ensure continuous improvement through analytics and feedback loops.
• Oversee the deployment, scaling, and maintenance of AI models and services using microservices, containerization, and orchestration frameworks (e.g., Kubernetes).
• Collaborate with business and analytics teams to define CX KPIs, SLAs, and success metrics, ensuring solutions deliver measurable business and customer impact.
• Mentor and guide engineers, conduct design and code reviews, and continuously drive architectural innovation and technical excellence.
• Stay current with emerging trends and research in conversational AI, speech technologies, and contact center analytics, bringing forward innovative ideas that enhance business outcomes and user experience.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in engineering or a related field


• 10+ years of experience in software development, with at least 2–3 years specifically in conversational AI, voice/telephony or contact center domain


• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, VXML or similar


• Hands-on experience in Google CES, Amazon Connect, Genesys or similar.


• Hands-on experience with NLP/NLU frameworks (e.g. spaCy, HuggingFace Transformers, Rasa, Dialogflow, LUIS, etc.)


• Experience with speech processing: ASR, TTS, acoustic modeling, voice signal processing


• Familiarity with MLOps tools, model serving, CI/CD pipelines


• Experience deploying AI/ML systems in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)


• Good understanding of REST APIs, microservices, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)


• Working knowledge of data engineering, orchestration, feature stores


• Ability to optimize for performance, scalability, latency, memory constraints


• Strong problem-solving skills, ability to break down complex systems


• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, capable of working across teams


• Ability to lead, mentor and guide junior engineers

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in contact center technologies (ACD, IVR, telephony protocols, CTI interfaces)


• Experience with voice biometrics, sentiment analysis, voice analytics


• Experience with real-time streaming / voice pipelines


• Familiarity with reinforcement learning or dialog policy optimization


• Knowledge of call center metrics (e.g. average handle time, first contact resolution, CSAT)

• 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