Reporting to the Vice President, Value Delivery Product, the Director, Acquirer APIs & Services will lead product strategy and execution for a portfolio of acquiring capabilities spanning merchant onboarding and maintenance, disputes, reconciliation and more.
This role sits within the broader Acquirer Value Delivery . The Director will own the products and capabilities themselves - what they do, how they work, how they evolve, and how they create value - while partnering with Value Delivery on investment, value narrative, go-to-market readiness, and adoption.
This is a product leadership role. The leader must be able to move fluidly from customer problems and commercial opportunities to API behavior, data models, service workflows, and architecture tradeoffs. They will work directly with Technology and Product Delivery to shape solutions, challenge constraints, and ensure that new and existing APIs are coherent, scalable, secure, and practical for external partners.
The Director will set the target state and multi-year roadmap for the portfolio, modernize existing services, develop new API and data capabilities, and translate those capabilities into measurable customer, operational, and commercial outcomes.
Product Strategy & Portfolio Evolution
- Own the strategy and roadmap for acquiring APIs and services
- Define the target-state product. balancing new capabilities, modernization, partner migration, and retirement of legacy services.
- Translate customer needs, market trends, and technology developments into differentiated and commercially viable product opportunities.
Product Ownership, Technical Design & Delivery
- Own the full product lifecycle—from discovery and solution design through build, launch, adoption, and ongoing evolution.
- Translate complex needs into clear requirements, API behaviors, domain models, workflows, non-functional requirements, and acceptance criteria.
- Work hands-on with Technology and Architecture to review and challenge API specifications, schemas, integration flows, and solution tradeoffs.
- Drive prioritization and product KPIs across customer value, reliability, data quality, adoption, revenue, and cost-to-serve.
Customer Value, Commercialization & Adoption
- Engage directly with partners, merchants, developers, and internal users to validate product decisions and solve meaningful end-to-end problems.
- Partner with teams on value propositions, packaging, pricing, go-to-market, and adoption.
- Develop business cases and ensure roadmap priorities reflect customer outcomes, scalability, and commercial potential.
- Support strategic partner and sales discussions with strong product, technical, and commercial expertise.
Cross-Functional Leadership & Influence
- Lead across GMNS, Technology, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Pricing, Commercial, and Servicing to drive coordinated execution.
- Build trust, challenge assumptions constructively, surface risks early, and create clarity in a highly matrixed environment.
- Raise the product and technical bar through customer-centered design, reusable models, complete workflows, and strong lifecycle management.
- Distill complex product and architecture topics into clear recommendations, tradeoffs, and decisions for senior leadership.
- Experience: Preferred 6+ years of product management or technical product leadership experience, including ownership of APIs, data products, platforms, or other complex B2B services used by external customers or partners.
- Technical fluency: Deep understanding of modern API and service architectures, including REST, event-driven models, webhooks, asynchronous processing, data contracts, security, performance, observability, versioning, and backward compatibility. Able to read and challenge detailed technical artifacts.
- Product judgment and solutioning: Demonstrated ability to move from an ambiguous customer or business problem to a coherent target-state product and technical solution, while making pragmatic delivery tradeoffs.
- Customer and commercial mindset: Proven ability to build technically complex products around real customer workflows and connect product decisions to adoption, revenue, operational efficiency, and measurable business value.
- Relationship leadership: Exceptional ability to earn trust, influence without authority, navigate a complex matrix, and create productive partnerships across Product, Technology, Architecture, Risk, Operations, and Commercial teams.
- High-bar execution: Track record of delivering durable products in demanding environments, with strong ownership, attention to detail, intellectual curiosity, and a bias toward action and measurable outcomes.
- Strategic thought leadership: Ability to connect market and technology shifts to a clear product strategy and translate that strategy into an executable roadmap.
- Transformational spirit: Proven ability to modernize legacy capabilities, lead complex cross-functional change, and improve how product and technology teams work together from strategy through execution.
- Executive communication: Outstanding communicator who can make complex product and technical topics clear, concise, and decision-oriented for audiences ranging from engineers to senior executives.
Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.
