Director - Cryptographic Architecture & Engineering

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.

At American Express, our mission is to deliver the world’s best customer experience every day. At the heart of this mission is our Information Security organization, enabling exceptional experiences built on a foundation of trust, service, and security. We leverage advanced technologies and data-driven insights to stay ahead of an evolving threat landscape. We foster a culture of passion, curiosity, and courage—empowering you to innovate, grow, and help shape the future of a Fortune 100 company.

Trust. Service. Security.

The Data Security team is responsible for safeguarding the organization’s most critical asset—its data—by ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability across all platforms and environments. Working at the intersection of cybersecurity, data governance, and privacy, the Data Security team focuses on capabilities such as data classification, encryption, secure data access, and monitoring. The team partners closely with engineering, risk, and business units to embed security controls throughout the data lifecycle—from creation and storage to sharing and archival.

This roles leads the design and modernization of enterprise cryptographic architecture, translating Data Security standards and emerging cryptographic requirements into implementable, reusable and increasingly automated security capabilities.

Provides technical leadership across payment and non-payment encryption, key management and HSMs, certificate and PKI architecture, cloud cryptography, post-quantum readiness and crypto-agility, and emerging cryptographic technologies including blockchain and distributed-ledger use cases.

The successful candidate will combine deep cryptographic expertise with strong engineering capability, moving beyond traditional architecture documentation to create architecture-as-code, reusable patterns, reference implementations, APIs and automated security guardrails that engineering teams can directly consume.

• Significant experience in cryptographic engineering, cybersecurity architecture, applied cryptography or security engineering in a large-scale technology environment.
• Deep knowledge of symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, encryption, digital signatures, hashing, TLS, key establishment and exchange, and modern cryptographic protocols.
• Strong experience with HSMs, enterprise key-management systems, PKI, certificates and cryptographic key lifecycle management.
• Experience designing encryption solutions across applications, APIs, databases, infrastructure and cloud environments.
• Demonstrated ability to translate security requirements into working technical architectures and reusable engineering patterns.
• Software engineering or automation capability sufficient to develop prototypes, integrations, policy or architecture-as-code and technical reference implementations.
• Experience working across engineering, architecture, product and cybersecurity organizations.
• Ability to communicate complex cryptographic concepts, risks and architecture decisions to engineering teams and senior leadership.
• Post-quantum cryptography (PQC), NIST PQC standards and enterprise crypto-agility programs.
• Experience within financial services or another highly regulated environment.
• Cloud KMS and HSM architectures across AWS, Azure and/or GCP.
• Large-scale cryptographic migrations or modernization programs.
• Payment cryptography, payment HSMs, payment key management and PCI requirements.

Highly Desired Experience

• Cryptographic inventory and Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM) capabilities.

• Blockchain and distributed-ledger cryptography and associated key and signature architectures.

• DevSecOps, architecture-as-code, policy-as-code and automated SDLC security enforcement.

What Makes This Role Different

This is not a traditional architecture role centered on reviewing designs and producing documentation.

The role is expected to turn cryptographic strategy and standards into capabilities that engineers can implement: Standards -> Architecture -> Code and Patterns -> Enterprise Services -> Automated Assurance.

Success means making secure cryptography easier, faster and more consistent to implement while preparing the enterprise for major transitions such as post-quantum cryptography. Hands-on engineering capability is strongly preferred.