Sr. Manager - AI Innovation & Research - MCP Platform

New York, NYFull-timePosted Jun 29, 2026

Amex Digital Labs’ mission is to build the future of payments and membership, creating new value that evolves with our customers' needs and drives deeper engagement and loyalty. We leverage emerging technologies to deliver innovations that enhance how customers pay, travel, dine, and experience the brand.

We are looking for a Technical Product Manager to help build and evolve consumer-facing Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities that enable agentic Membership experiences for Amex Card Members within AI/LLM partner channels. This role will sit at the intersection of AI technology, platform product management, developer experience, data governance, and customer-facing digital experiences.

The Technical Product Manager will work closely with engineering teams responsible for developing and deploying MCP servers, product and business stakeholders who own the internal systems that power Membership experiences today, business development teams that manage relationships with external AI/LLM partners, and go-to-market teams that support product approvals and launches. The role will help define how American Express capabilities are exposed to AI agents and partner platforms in a secure, scalable, reliable, and responsible way.

Success in this role requires strong technical product judgment, AI fluency, comfort working with platform and integration technologies, and the ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear product requirements, tradeoffs, and business outcomes.

Build and Evolve MCP Capabilities

Partner deeply with engineering teams to understand and apply emerging technologies, including Model Context Protocol, Agent-to-Agent Protocol, tool orchestration, and related agentic frameworks, to enable Membership experiences within consumer LLM platforms.
Help define the scope, architecture, and product requirements for Amex MCP servers, including considerations such as read-only contexts versus write actions, synchronous versus asynchronous context, streaming versus snapshot responses, tool discoverability, and lifecycle management.
Partner with engineers and solutions architects to identify technical solutions, assess tradeoffs, define specifications, and deliver platform capabilities that support secure, reliable, and scalable agentic Membership experiences.
Contribute to the ongoing evolution of MCP capabilities at American Express by identifying reusable patterns, improving developer experience, and balancing flexibility, standardization, and operational reliability.

Prepare Amex Capabilities for Agentic Experiences

Partner with internal business, platform, and engineering teams to catalogue, permission, and prepare American Express assets and capabilities for use within LLMs by defining tool schemas, metadata, access controls, documentation, versioning, deprecation processes, and quality standards.
Translate customer, partner, business, and technical needs into product features, user stories, acceptance criteria, evaluation criteria, user experiences, roadmap priorities, and backlog items.
Serve as a knowledgeable internal partner on MCP concepts, design decisions, implementation patterns, and tradeoffs, helping cross-functional teams understand how to build and launch agentic experiences responsibly.

Support Security, Governance, and Responsible AI

Collaborate with Legal, Compliance, Risk, Privacy, Information Security, and data governance teams to ensure American Express assets, services, and customer data are surfaced and used in a compliant, secure, transparent, and responsible way.
Define product requirements for authentication, authorization, consent, permissioning, auditability, traceability, abuse prevention, rate limiting, and policy enforcement across agent interactions.
Evaluate LLM-based experiences that use American Express proprietary assets to ensure accuracy, appropriate orchestration, reliability, personalization, and adherence to guardrails.

Drive Delivery, Measurement, and Partner Readiness

Define and monitor product and platform metrics, including adoption, usage, retention, latency, error rates, integration failures, tool performance, and customer experience quality.
Support development and release planning, navigate complex dependencies across product, engineering, partner, and governance teams, and communicate impacts clearly to stakeholders.
Partner with business development, go-to-market, and partner-facing teams to support launch readiness, approval processes, partner integration needs, and ongoing optimization of agentic Membership experiences.

Minimum Qualifications

6-8+ years of experience in technical product management, product development, software engineering, platform products, APIs, developer tools, AI products, or partner-enabled digital experiences.
Passion for technology with a clear customer focus; strong communication skills and the ability to provide clarity and direction across technical and non-technical teams.
Strong understanding of AI and agentic product concepts, such as LLMs, grounding, reasoning, agents, tool calling, orchestration, context management, and evaluation.
Experience working with platform, API, developer-facing, or integration products, including translating technical concepts into product requirements, roadmap priorities, and delivery plans.
Strong working knowledge of technologies relevant to third-party integrations, such as OAuth, APIs, SDKs, authentication, authorization, consent, and secure data exchange.
Experience working with engineering, architecture, security, legal, compliance, privacy, risk, or data governance stakeholders to launch customer-facing or partner-facing capabilities.
Ability to balance customer, business, partner, technical, and regulatory needs; gather information, assess tradeoffs and risks, gain buy-in, and make evidence-based decisions.
Enthusiasm for exceptional products and services; deep customer empathy, familiarity with customer research methods, keen product intuition, and ability to articulate product functionality clearly.
Strong relationship-building skills; ability to influence stakeholders and drive alignment in highly cross-functional environments.
Recognizes issues quickly and drives resolution through creative, efficient problem-solving.
Curious and entrepreneurial; learns how things work, connects ideas across teams and technologies, and moves fluidly between strategy and detail.
Creative within a highly regulated financial-services environment.
Team player, comfortable with ambiguity, and highly organized.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience working with Large Language Models, AI agents, MCP, function calling, tool orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, conversational AI, or related technologies.
Experience building or managing APIs, SDKs, developer platforms, partner integrations, ecosystem products, or platform capabilities used by multiple internal or external consumers.
Familiarity with MCP standards, agent frameworks, AI tooling ecosystems, and emerging industry patterns.
Experience defining product metrics, experimentation approaches, evaluation frameworks, observability requirements, or platform monitoring capabilities.
Experience with responsible AI, AI governance, model or tool evaluation, data minimization, consent, transparency, or customer data protection.
Experience partnering with security, identity, privacy, enterprise architecture, or platform engineering teams.
Experience building products in highly regulated industries such as financial services, payments, fintech, or technology.
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.

Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.