Director - Tech Operations

The Opportunity

Joining Amex Tech means helping build and operate technology that supports critical business capabilities at enterprise scale. We are seeking an experienced Director of Engineering to lead a portfolio within the Operations Data and Analytics organization spanning ServiceNow and IT Service Management (ITSM), Strategy platform engineering, and observability and operational analytics for the Customer Journey availability program.

A significant area of focus will be the continued development and modernization of Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) capabilities that support these processes. This leader will help ensure these capabilities operate as integrated enterprise technology products, with strong engineering practices, reliable data, appropriate governance, and roadmaps aligned to the needs of the broader technology organization.

This leader will be responsible for bringing together platforms, engineering practices, operational processes, and data to improve availability, resiliency, efficiency, and measurable business outcomes across mission-critical technology services.

The role requires an experienced engineering leader who can operate at both the strategic and execution levels—setting direction and developing technical talent while maintaining sufficient depth to challenge architecture, engineering, reliability, platform, and service-management decisions.

How You Will Make an Impact

Engineering & Platform Leadership
• Lead engineering and platform capabilities supporting ServiceNow/ITSM, Strategy, and Customer Journeys.
• Establish and execute multi-year platform and engineering strategies aligned with organizational priorities.
• Drive modernization of platform architecture, engineering practices, automation, integrations, and data capabilities.
• Establish standards for software quality, testing, deployment, security, scalability, resilience, and maintainability.
• Ensure critical platforms meet expectations for availability, performance, scalability, security, and regulatory compliance.
• Develop strong technical talent and create organizational depth while establishing clear accountability and ownership.

ServiceNow, ITSM & Operational Excellence
• Provide strategic and engineering leadership for ServiceNow and associated enterprise ITSM capabilities, with particular emphasis on Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and CMDB development as it relates to those areas.
• Establish and evolve a technology roadmap for these capabilities that aligns ServiceNow development with enterprise operational, reliability, risk, product owners, and business priorities.
• Maintain a strong understanding of industry standards, established practices, and emerging trends across ITIL-based Incident, Problem, Change, and Configuration Management and use that knowledge to inform platform strategy and engineering priorities.
• Ensure CMDB capabilities supporting Incident, Problem, and Change processes provide accurate, useful, and sustainable configuration and relationship data.
• Drive integration across Incident, Problem, Change, and CMDB capabilities so that configuration data strengthens impact analysis, root-cause analysis, risk assessment, operational decision-making, and automation.
• Partner with ITSM process owners and technology stakeholders to translate process strategy into scalable ServiceNow capabilities.
• Participate in and influence the ServiceNow roadmap through established governance, prioritization, and planning forums, representing the needs and priorities of SRE, Application Support, Operations Engineering, and other technology stakeholders.
• Build alignment across process owners, platform teams, engineering organizations, and senior leaders on ServiceNow priorities, investments, sequencing, and technical direction.
• Challenge unnecessary process or platform complexity while ensuring appropriate controls, governance, and auditability.
• Identify opportunities to automate manual workflows, eliminate process gaps, improve data quality, and reduce operational toil.
• Ensure ServiceNow capabilities evolve as engineered products rather than simply administrative workflows.
• Establish metrics demonstrating the effectiveness of ITSM capabilities and their impact on availability, reliability, engineering productivity, and operational outcomes.

Observability, SRE & Availability
• Define and evolve observability capabilities using technologies such as Dynatrace, Splunk, OpenTelemetry, and related enterprise tooling.
• Improve telemetry, monitoring, alerting, event correlation, and root-cause-analysis capabilities.
• Drive adoption of engineering practices that move teams from reactive monitoring toward proactive observability and reliability management.
• Partner with SRE and application teams to establish meaningful SLIs, SLOs, availability measures, and service-health standards.
• Use operational data to identify recurring failure patterns and prioritize engineering investments.
• Connect observability, CMDB, Incident, and Problem data to improve identification and resolution of reliability issues.
• Expand the footprint of our Customer Journeys and align them to critical business services.

Strategy & Data Platforms
• Lead application development and production support for Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), including delivery execution and the long-term platform roadmap.
• Ensure availability, scalability, and performance of BI and analytics capabilities supporting critical business and operational decisions.
• Drive modernization of data architecture, tooling, and engineering practices.
• Partner with business and technology stakeholders to develop advanced analytics and data-driven operational insights.
• Create integrations with other operational solutions including agentic solutions.

Customer Journey Availability
• Provide leadership across modern data ecosystems and workflow/orchestration technologies such as Apache Airflow.
• Lead and expand capabilities for measuring end-to-end availability across critical customer journeys.
• Establish visibility and accountability across application, infrastructure, platform, and business teams.
• Support 99.99% availability objectives for designated critical journeys through standardized measurement, governance, and engineering practices.
• Establish controls and processes supporting reliability, risk management, auditability, and consistent delivery of business outcomes.
• Use observability and operational data to proactively identify risks affecting customer experiences.

Financial & Organizational Leadership
• Build, attract, retain, and develop high-performing engineering talent.
• Lead effectively across globally distributed teams and stakeholders.

Qualifications
• Significant experience leading enterprise engineering, platform engineering, SRE, production management, data, or technology operations organizations.
• Demonstrated experience providing leadership to senior engineers and technical leaders.
• Strong experience with ServiceNow and enterprise ITSM/ITIL processes, particularly Incident, Problem, Change, and Configuration Management.
• Strong understanding of industry standards and established ITIL practices associated with Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and Configuration Management.
• Experience developing or overseeing CMDB capabilities that directly support Incident, Problem, and Change processes.
• Demonstrated experience participating in and influencing ServiceNow platform roadmaps through established governance, planning, and prioritization forums in a complex enterprise environment.
• Ability to influence platform direction across organizations where roadmap ownership, process ownership, engineering execution, and business priorities may reside with different teams.
• Experience with enterprise observability platforms such as Dynatrace and Splunk, including modern telemetry and monitoring practices.
• Strong background in application development, data platforms, analytics ecosystems, and production engineering.
• Experience defining and executing large-scale technology and platform strategies.
• Experience operating business-critical systems in highly available and regulated environments.
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering, APIs, DevOps, CI/CD, cloud, automation, and reliability engineering.
• Demonstrated ability to influence peers and leaders and align teams across complex global organizations.

Preferred Qualifications
• Experience with Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) or comparable enterprise BI platforms.
• Experience with Apache Airflow or comparable data orchestration technologies.
• Experience with Site Reliability and Operations Engineering in a large-scale application support organization.
• Experience establishing enterprise observability strategies.

Leadership Qualities

Successful Directors in this role will demonstrate the ability to:
• Set a clear technology vision and convert strategy into executable roadmaps.
• Develop senior engineers and technical leaders.
• Create clear ownership and accountability while empowering individuals to make decisions.
• Balance delivery speed with reliability, security, technical debt, regulatory requirements, and long-term maintainability.
• Communicate complex technical issues and tradeoffs effectively with both engineers and executives.
• Influence enterprise platform and process direction when decision-making is distributed across multiple organizations.
• Build consensus through established governance while being willing to constructively challenge priorities and approaches.
• Make sound decisions in ambiguous situations.
• Create an engineering culture centered on technical excellence, automation, continuous improvement, and learning.
• Maintain sufficient technical depth to challenge teams without becoming the team's de facto principal engineer.