The Director of Technical Architecture role will provide technology portfolio architecture (PFA) leadership for the Finance, Corporate and Compliance Technologies organization (FCC-T). The overall organization charter is to provide technology delivery leadership for numerous business groups including Treasury, Controllership, Basel, Finance, General Counsel’s Office, Compliance, Global Advertising and Brand Management. This particular PFA role will provide architecture leadership for various business intelligence and data warehousing initiatives within FCC-T. Most visible initial capabilities supported will include Amex’s BASEL II warehouse platform as well as the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing (BIDW) platform.

This PFA role functions as a technology architecture and technology strategy steward, ensuring that overall portfolio capabilities support business strategies. Responsibilities include setting technology direction, providing consulting expertise and driving innovation while promoting best practices, and improved technology qualities of service (e.g., performance, scalability, availability, security, efficiency).

This role reports directly to the VP Integrator of FCC-T.

Responsibilities

* Provides support for American Express’s technology management and compliance functions such as:
* Application development compliance with technology standards practices (Standards and Exceptions)
* Application architecture governance and management (SAR, JADR, AIM, APM)
* Technology uplift management (AIU)
* Data center support (DC2015)
* Reference Architecture adoption (RA)
* Application architecture consulting

* Leads technology proofs of concept and platform technology health assessments.
* Provides deep architecture and strategy support for top portfolio projects.
* Leads cross-portfolio technical strategy and roadmap efforts ensuring broad integration and support of business principles, goals and strategic drivers.
* Builds and maintains strong relationships with Business and Technology partners, ensuring regular communication of delivery progress are maintained.
* Manages Lead Technical Architects and leads dotted-line (matrixed) vertical architecture teams and forums.
* Partners with American Express Technology (AET) teams to define and drive the change necessary to integrate existing platforms and applications with new capabilities.
* Supports cross-portfolio application management analysis (APM).
* Continually drives innovation and portfolio wide consistency/improvement of technology qualities of service (e.g., performance, scalability, availability, security, efficiency).

American Express is an equal opportunity employer.
Qualifications

* Holds a Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or other related field (or has equivalent work experience).
* Proven experience with large Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence solutions: especially designing and implementing high performance, highly available DW and BI solutions.
* Knowledge of American Express large data warehouse platforms and finance information processing flows is a plus.
* Strong technical skills with related DW and BI technology and methods:
* Very large DBMS’s (especially Oracle, UDB or Teradata)
* Business Intelligence tools (especially MicroStrategy or OBIEE)
* Data Management and ETL tools (especially Informatica or AbInitio)
* Data modeling and database design techniques (ERD and dimensional modeling)
* Metadata data integration and management
* Platform wide performance monitoring and tuning

* Understands current industry best-practices, emerging technology and trends as well as the competitive landscape.
* Must be able to develop well reasoned and structured architectures and strategies and also be able to influence portfolio wide technical direction.
* Should be highly inclusive and collaborative with both technology and business partners.
* Must possess strong verbal and written communication skills. Should be able to craft compelling presentations and deliver those effectively to technology and business leadership at any level.
* Strategic thinker with analytical and problem solving skills.
* Effective consultative skills across a multi-functional environment.
* Should be comfortable working in an evolving and rapidly changing environment.
* Experience with multiple systems development lifecycle methodologies to include waterfall and agile.
* Financial management experience.