While the idea of “paved roads” in technology is widely recognized, American Express has reimagined this concept to serve its unique ecosystem of engineers. At its core, a paved road represents a thoughtfully crafted pathway that removes unnecessary friction, empowers teams to deliver with greater confidence, and accelerates innovation by promoting best practices.

At American Express, these paved roads are far more than just technical guidelines; they are the backbone of a community-driven culture that values collaboration, transparency, and continuous improvement. By streamlining the journey from development to production, Amex ensures that every engineer, whether new or seasoned, has access to the resources, templates, and support needed to build, deploy, and maintain world-class software. This intentional approach not only heightens productivity but also fosters a spirit of shared ownership and excellence across the organization.

Codifying Best Practices: The Birth of the Amex Way

In 2020, the Developer Experience team formalized software development at Amex with the “Building Software the Amex Way” initiative. Over 500 engineers contributed to the Amex Way Library, forming a collaborative repository of architecture patterns, CI/CD pipelines, and community tools. This resource empowered teams to navigate the engineering landscape with clarity and consistency. With the Amex Way, we started our journey to formalizing the way we constantly iterate, test and learn, and socialize best practices across our community.

Activating The Developer Community

As the library evolved, engineers called for repeatable workflows and consistent deployment strategies. A couple of our Distinguished Engineers responded by launching community-driven paved roads, starting with the JVM and soon followed by Go, a process maintained by active JVM and Go Guilds. These templates, crafted “by devs for devs,” ensured relevance, rapid adoption, and robust community stewardship. The intentional approach established a backbone of collaboration and continuous improvement throughout the organization.

Transparency and Security Embedded in Every Step

Paved roads at Amex are built with transparency and security at their core. Technical Guilds collaborate openly with the community via public pull requests, allowing anyone to offer feedback. Security and compliance guardrails are natively embedded in CI/CD templates, allowing engineers to focus on customer innovation while upholding our rigorous safety standards. This allows every engineer, whether new or seasoned, access to resources, templates, and support for building world-class software.

Flexible Solutions for Diverse Needs

Each paved road combines a comprehensive playbook, a real-world template, and (for Go) a modular toolkit enabling customization for resiliency, security, and observability. For web development, the micro-frontend platform empowers teams to contribute, iterate, and roll out features for customer-facing websites without sacrificing user experience or consistency.

Python Paved Road: A Feat of Collaboration

In early 2024, the Python Guild activated a distributed team of 21 contributors across five time zones to define a uniquely Amex approach for Python. To meet the challenge of engagement and consensus, three collaborative working groups were formed, each comprised of a group of article writers, a senior engineer technical reviewer, and a technical writer. These working groups also convened in open Slack discussions and managed a repository of Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) to document rationale and ensure transparency. These efforts culminated in a one-of-a-kind paved road that accelerates innovation while promoting best practices.

Key Learnings from Building the Python Paved Road

  • Engage Within Existing Workflows: Balancing new practices with familiar routines minimizes cognitive load and accelerates adoption.

  • Distributed Collaboration Works with Clear Structure: Cross-timezone teams thrive with small, focused groups and open communication channels.

  • Transparency Builds Consensus: Public discussions and immutable documentation of decisions (ADRs) foster trust and community buy-in.

  • Focus on Fundamentals, Plan for Growth: Limiting initial scope to generic web service fundamentals enables future expansion to broader Python use cases like AI, data science, and cybersecurity.

Continuous Evolution: Launching and Scaling the Python Paved Road

Launched in January, the Python paved road quickly gained traction, drawing over 3,000 unique visitors to its guidebook. The next phase will see the introduction of practical templates, empowering teams to deploy production-ready services rapidly, guided by a one-touch/zero-touch deployment strategy. Quarterly updates will broaden coverage, supporting the evolving needs of a diverse engineering community and ensuring Amex continues to set the standard for developer experience and innovation.