Jordan Docherty

Staff Engineer, Applied AI R&D · Amex Bay Area

partnerships

Started American Express's Applied R&D team in the Bay Area at the request of the CTO. Lead a small, high-impact team of senior engineers prototyping agentic approaches to long-horizon problems, advise Amex Ventures on early-stage AI investment, and feed external research back into platform strategy.

• Building agentic AI harnesses for long-horizon tasks, in particular mainframe and legacy code modernization, where deterministic AST-driven transformations and agentic reasoning have to work together.
• Operational AI, embedded with a partner team to bring agent-driven automation into their day-to-day enterprise workflows, where reliability and audit constraints matter as much as the model.
• Contribute to research partnerships with Stanford (digital twins) and MIT (legacy modernization) through company-sponsored research tokens, translating findings back into shippable patterns and internal whitepapers.
• Drove early enterprise adoption of coding agents in 2024: harness design, evaluation tooling, operational guardrails.
• Advise Amex Ventures on early-stage technical diligence for AI and frontier-tech startups; diligence outcomes informing investments (e.g., Replit).
• Speaker at numerous internal technical events on the future of the SDLC and how the org should prepare for AI adoption at scale; reverse-mentor senior leadership on agentic AI.
• Authored an internal whitepaper on post-quantum cryptography and cryptographic agility for the firm, in partnership with a quantum cryptography startup.

Staff Engineer / Senior Engineering Manager, Payments Platform · Amex Florida

Relocated to the US to lead autopay across the global payments platform, first as Senior Engineering Manager, then Staff Engineer / Architect. Set platform direction across a 70+ engineer organization processing over $1T annually.

• Led an 8-engineer platform team and served as architect across a 70+ engineer organization to design and build shareable payments infrastructure such as scheduling and clearing technology, under strict latency, reliability, and regulatory constraints.
• Redesigned the architecture onto a greenfield “Modern Payments” platform, starting with small markets, working through domain-driven design sessions, and ultimately delivering high-throughput, idempotent systems for managing autopay and clearing.
• Led modernization of legacy mainframe and Java systems into Kotlin-based microservices on Kubernetes / OpenShift, with event-driven workflows on Kafka and guaranteed delivery leaning on Temporal.
• Built the API governance function from scratch (design standards, contract-first workflows, and Stoplight Spectral linting) used by partner-facing and internal teams across the org.
• Drove domain modeling and schema governance to improve cross-team interoperability and long-term platform evolution.
• Mentored senior engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers; set engineering standards and delivery practices across the org.

Senior Engineer, Payments · Amex (UK)

Joined the UK money movement engineering organization as a senior engineer on the payments platform. Worked across the legacy estate and the early modernization wave that followed me to the US.

Lead Software Engineer · DriverNet (UK)

2017 European Satellite Navigation Competition · UK winner · sponsored by European Space Agency

Lead engineer at an early-stage logistics / transportation startup. Full-stack: native mobile, backend services, infrastructure.

• Architected and delivered the platform end-to-end; ran successful production trials with operator partners.
• Helped secure UK government innovation funding for the company.

MSc Advanced Computer Science · University of Manchester (UK)

BSc Computer Science, First Class Honours · University of Salford (UK)