American Express is on a technologist hiring spree, with 1,500 open positions for software engineers, developers, data scientists, and other specialists.

According to Bloomberg, American Express has already added 3,600 technologists to its workforce in 2022. “It is without a doubt a challenging environment to recruit technical talent,” Ravi Radhakrishnan, AmEx’s chief information officer, stated in an interview. “The war for talent is a true consideration.” 

American Express has seen its revenue spike this year as card-waving customers emerge from pandemic lockdowns with an urge to spend. Those earnings allow the company to build out its tech workforce, even as increased customer activity heightens the need for everything from data analytics to fraud management.

American Express is just one of many financial firms aggressively pursuing technologists right now. According to a recent article in the Financial Times, financial firms from the Wall Street giants to tiny fintech startups are all leveraging their budgets to hire as many developers, analysts, and other specialists as they can find. For example, Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, has grown its tech staff by a quarter in 2022. Companies like Goldman Sachs have been doing their best to lure technologists away from tech giants such as Google and Meta.

CompTIA’s latest monthly jobs report places finance as one of the top industries for technologists, just behind professional, scientific and technical services, and well ahead of manufacturing, information, retail, and public administration. Although some fintech companies in volatile segments (such as cryptocurrency) have been laying people off and freezing hiring, that’s clearly not the story of the whole finance industry.

At the root of finance’s insatiable hunger for technologists is the increasing sophistication of the industry’s core platforms. An ever-expanding number of finance activities, from algorithm-based quant trading to crypto, require technologists who’ve mastered everything from key programming languages to software development and abstract problem-solving. American Express may want top talent, but it’ll have to compete against some deep-pocketed players to get it.