Manager-Tech Ops Engineering

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About Enterprise Identity SRE & Application Support

Enterprise Identity is the foundation of American Express's digital customer experience, enabling secure, seamless, and reliable authentication and authorization across our digital ecosystem.

The Enterprise Identity Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Application Support organization plays a critical role in ensuring the availability, performance, scalability, security, and operational resilience of mission-critical Identity and Access Management (IAM) platforms.

Our technology ecosystem includes customer authentication and logon services, OAuth-based authorization capabilities supporting Open Banking, customer identity systems of record such as Product Registry and Profile, and advanced authentication and verification capabilities including One Auth, AuthN+, and Verification Services.

Operating in a highly distributed, always-on environment, our teams support platforms with availability objectives of 99.99% and above. Through a global follow-the-sun support model spanning the United States and India, we deliver 24x7x365 operational coverage.

We partner closely with Product, Software Engineering, Architecture, Cybersecurity, and Delivery teams to engineer reliability into our platforms, accelerate automation, improve observability, and continuously enhance production stability.

How Will You Make an Impact in This Role?

• We are seeking a technically accomplished and results-driven Manager Tech Ops Engineering - Enterprise Identity SRE & Application Support to lead a team of engineers responsible for the reliability, availability, and operational excellence of critical customer identity platforms.
• This is a hands-on technical leadership position requiring strong expertise in site reliability engineering, modern application architectures, cloud-native technologies, production troubleshooting, observability, and automation.
• The successful candidate will combine deep engineering knowledge with strong people leadership to drive operational transformation, reduce production incidents, improve Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Restore/Recover (MTTR), and establish scalable, proactive, and automated reliability practices.
• You will serve as a technical leader and escalation point for complex production challenges, working across engineering and business teams to improve system resilience, eliminate recurring issues, and enable reliable delivery of new capabilities.
• Beyond managing day-to-day operations, you will help evolve traditional application support into an engineering-driven SRE organization focused on automation, proactive detection, self-healing, and continuous reliability improvement.

Technical Leadership & People Management

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of approximately 8-10 Site Reliability and Application Support Engineers, fostering technical excellence, ownership, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across Enterprise Identity platforms, including application architecture, distributed systems, authentication and authorization services, and supporting infrastructure.
• Act as a technical subject matter expert and escalation point for complex production incidents, performance bottlenecks, and system reliability challenges.
• Establish engineering standards, operational best practices, and technical development plans to strengthen team capabilities.
• Collaborate with senior engineering leaders, architects, product owners, and cross-functional stakeholders to influence technology strategy and operational priorities.

Site Reliability Engineering & Production Excellence

• Drive the adoption and maturity of SRE principles and practices across mission-critical Enterprise Identity applications and services.
• Define, monitor, and improve Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and operational reliability metrics aligned with business expectations.
• Lead initiatives to achieve high availability, fault tolerance, scalability, and resilience across distributed application environments.
• Improve incident detection, diagnosis, and recovery through advanced monitoring, observability, automation, and operational intelligence.
• Drive measurable reductions in MTTD, MTTR, repeat incidents, and operational toil.
• Identify systemic reliability risks and partner with engineering teams to implement sustainable architectural and application-level improvements.
• Champion capacity planning, performance engineering, resilience testing, and proactive production readiness.

Incident, Problem & Change Management

• Provide technical leadership during high-severity production incidents, coordinating troubleshooting, recovery, communication, and escalation activities.
• Guide engineers through complex application failures involving APIs, microservices, authentication workflows, databases, infrastructure, and downstream dependencies.
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and blameless post-incident reviews, ensuring corrective and preventive actions address underlying systemic issues.
• Establish effective incident response playbooks, runbooks, escalation procedures, and operational knowledge repositories.
• Partner with Engineering and Product teams to identify recurring production defects and prioritize permanent engineering solutions.
• Ensure effective communication of production health, incident trends, risks, and remediation progress to senior leadership.

Automation, AIOps & Operational Transformation

• Drive an automation-first approach to production support, reducing manual intervention and repetitive operational activities.
• Lead the development and implementation of automation solutions using Python, Java, scripting frameworks, APIs, and orchestration technologies.
• Leverage AIOps, intelligent alerting, event correlation, and anomaly detection to improve operational efficiency and incident prevention.
• Promote automated diagnostics, remediation workflows, and self-healing capabilities wherever technically appropriate.
• Partner with engineering teams to improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, operational tooling, and production release reliability.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI-assisted troubleshooting, incident summarization, and operational analytics to accelerate issue resolution.

Observability, Performance & Cloud-Native Engineering

• Drive end-to-end observability strategies across applications, APIs, microservices, and infrastructure using logs, metrics, distributed tracing, and actionable alerting.
• Leverage technologies such as Splunk, ELK, Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry, and related monitoring platforms.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues across Java/Spring Boot applications, REST APIs, containerized workloads, and distributed systems.
• Partner with engineering teams to improve application instrumentation, service dependency visibility, performance monitoring, and production diagnostics.
• Support reliability and operational excellence for applications deployed on OpenShift, Kubernetes, and other cloud-native platforms.
• Promote performance optimization, resource efficiency, scalability, and fault-tolerant application design.

Engineering Partnership, Release Readiness & Resilience

• Collaborate with Software Engineering, Product, Architecture, and Delivery teams throughout the software development lifecycle to ensure production readiness.
• Define and validate non-functional requirements (NFRs), including availability, performance, scalability, recoverability, security, and observability.
• Participate in architecture reviews, technical design discussions, release planning, and deployment readiness assessments.
• Drive operational acceptance criteria and production readiness reviews for new applications, enhancements, and integrations.
• Partner with delivery teams to implement safe deployment practices, rollback strategies, and post-release validation.
• Contribute to disaster recovery planning, failover testing, business continuity exercises, and resilience validation.
• Champion continuous improvement through engineering retrospectives, operational metrics, and reliability-focused initiatives.

Minimum Qualifications

Education & Professional Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, production engineering, or application support for large-scale enterprise applications.
• 3+ years of experience leading, mentoring, or managing technical engineering teams.
• Demonstrated experience supporting business-critical, highly available applications in a 24x7 production environment.
• Strong experience troubleshooting complex distributed applications and leading technical incident resolution.

Technical Engineering Expertise

• Strong programming and scripting skills in at least one language such as Python, Java, or Ruby, with the ability to develop automation, diagnostic utilities, and operational tools.
• Hands-on experience supporting Java-based enterprise applications, including Spring Boot, RESTful APIs, and microservices architectures.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, application dependencies, HTTP/HTTPS, network fundamentals, load balancing, caching, and database connectivity.
• Experience with containerized applications and cloud-native platforms such as OpenShift, Kubernetes, or equivalent technologies.
• Strong knowledge of application troubleshooting, performance analysis, system diagnostics, and production debugging.
• Experience implementing or supporting CI/CD pipelines, automated deployments, and release management processes.

Reliability, Observability & Automation

• 5+ years of experience implementing or operating application monitoring, logging, metrics, alerting, and observability solutions.
• Hands-on experience with one or more observability platforms such as Splunk, ELK, Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace, or equivalent tools.
• 3+ years of experience developing operational automation, scripting solutions, or automated remediation workflows.
• Demonstrated understanding of SRE principles, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and toil reduction.
• Experience improving application availability, resilience, performance, and operational efficiency through engineering-driven solutions.
• Strong experience in root cause analysis, production problem management, and implementation of preventive measures.

Leadership & Delivery

• Demonstrated ability to lead engineers through high-priority production incidents and complex technical investigations.
• Strong stakeholder management, communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
• Experience working with Agile teams and tools such as Jira and Confluence.
• Ability to translate technical challenges and operational risks into clear recommendations and actionable improvement plans.
• Experience collaborating across geographically distributed engineering and support teams.

Preferred Qualifications

Identity & Security Engineering

• Experience supporting enterprise Identity and Access Management (IAM), authentication, or authorization platforms.
• Understanding of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Single Sign-On (SSO), and related identity protocols.
• Familiarity with API security, token lifecycle management, session management, and authentication workflows.
• Experience supporting customer-facing identity services in financial services or other highly regulated environments.

Advanced SRE & Platform Engineering

• Prior experience as a Site Reliability Engineer, Production Engineer, Software Engineer, or technical lead supporting large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience designing or improving highly available, fault-tolerant, and horizontally scalable application architectures.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes/OpenShift troubleshooting, container orchestration, and cloud-native operational practices.
• Knowledge of infrastructure as code and automation frameworks such as Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent technologies.
• Experience with resilience engineering techniques, including load testing, failover testing, chaos engineering, and disaster recovery validation.
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, application performance management, and service dependency mapping.

AIOps & Intelligent Operations

• Experience implementing AIOps capabilities, anomaly detection, event correlation, predictive monitoring, or intelligent incident management.
• Exposure to AI-assisted operational tooling, automated diagnostics, and self-healing architectures.
• Experience developing automation frameworks or internal tools that improve engineering productivity and reduce operational toil.

Operational Excellence

• Working knowledge of IT Service Management (ITSM) principles, including incident, problem, change, and release management.
• Experience with production readiness assessments, operational risk management, and non-functional requirements validation.
• Experience establishing reliability dashboards, operational scorecards, and measurable continuous improvement programs.
• Demonstrated ability to influence engineering practices and drive cross-functional technical initiatives.