Principal SWE for Data

This is a remote position; however, the candidate must reside within 30 miles of one of the following locations: Portland, ME; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; and San Francisco Bay Area, CA.

About the Team/Role

We are looking for a highly motivated, technically deep, and experienced hands-on Software Engineer to join a group of high-performing engineers in the Data area to provide hands-on technical leadership including tech direction, tech stack decisioning, architecture design, E-2-E development, deployment, and in production measurement/monitoring.

It's very important for the engineers in the data team to gain a strong understanding of Wex Business, Data from all Wex products and services, and the business logic behind. The leader should lead by example to gain deep understanding in these.

This is a fantastic opportunity for a highly motivated and passionate hands-on technical leader to apply their deep expertise and rich experience in the Big data, Data Platform, AI, software development, and related areas to develop technology, systems, and services, and empower the applications of them to multiple lines of business with a big customer base to generate real business impacts in a fast growing commerce platform and payment tech company during its technology transformation stage to meet high customer demands. At the same time, they will learn and grow their career by solving large scale and complex problems.

This leader will have technical ownership of the tech aspects of the data layer, including but not limited to architecture, technical direction, data modeling, data processing, serving, insights, engineering best practice, quality, security, and compliance. This also includes proper and effective architectural integration with other platforms, including AI platforms & applications, products, and services across the company. This leader will work closely with the team members of the Data team in a hands-on way, and provide guidance and coaches.

This role will report to the Engineering VP of Data, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. This role can also be in Chicago, Portland, Maine (Wex HQ), or Boston. The ideal candidate has deep understanding and rich experience working with large scale data related platform, system, applications, and services in a hands-on manner; is excited to engage and build relationships with a wide variety of stakeholders and solve challenging customer and business problems in a sustainable way; and is passionate about the power of big data and data services to transform organizations and processes across the company, both for company internal data needs and for serving external customers through enabling data-power product development.

How you'll make an impact

• From the technology and engineering side, lead and drive the development of technology and platform for the company's data needs, ensure the functional richness, reliability, performance, and flexibility of the data assets and data ecosystem.

• Own the technology and architecture of the data assets, data platforms, and services, by partnering with the engineering VP and other leaders in the team.

• Challenge the status quo and hold a high bar to drive for better and better technical solutions to effectively serve all the needs in the broad data area of Wex.

• Closely partner with the leaders in other orgs, especially the product partners of data in the Digital org, the Risk & Compliance org, and other LOBs to deeply understand the customer needs in the areas. Use the customer needs as a key driver for your technical design and implementation to serve the customer and business needs effectively.

• Closely partner with the other orgs in Technology to serve their needs in big data, insights, and analytics, and jointly build up a strong technology foundation for the company's strong growth.

• Drive the technical vision and strategy in your areas to serve the company's needs, balancing for the near term and long term. This should be done through a close collaboration with your product management partner and the technical leader in the parent org.

• Set a high bar, and provide technical guidance and effective training & mentorship to the engineering teams in the group, including engineering principles, skills, and best practices. Uphold strong DORA metrics across the org. Foster an environment of continuous learning and innovation. Build an inclusive, productive, innovative, and engaging Data team, including attracting high talents from the industry.
  Guide the leaders in your group to do the same.

• Partner with the security org and SRE org to ensure continuous improvement and meeting of security requirements, SLOs, and error budget.

Experience you'll bring

• A technically deep, innovative, empathetic, and passionate technical leader able to act and deliver to the business needs.

• Have 12+ years of software design and development experience at a large scale.

• Deep technically; hands-on in architecture design, development, deployment, and production operation; familiar with agile software development and modern development tools and frameworks, especially in the big data area; holding strong engineering principles including automation and quality as well as best practices with a high bar. Extensive experience in full software development life cycle E2E including in production monitoring.

• Extensive experience in the big data area, including architecturing and developing large scale data and data systems.

• Extensive experience designing and building large scale data platforms to support the full life cycle of data including data modeling (conceptual business models), data ingestion, storage, processing, enrichment, clearing, optimization, publishing, serving, data quality, data usability, and data governance. Experience in data security, privacy, and compliance handling.

• First-hand experience with the modern data stack, such as Data Lake, Data Lakehouse, cloud based data warehouse.

• Broad understanding of cloud architecture tools and services, such as S3, EMR, Kubernetes, Lambda functions. Experience in AWS and Azure is highly desirable.

• Experience building reliable streaming pipelines at scale using Kafka and Spark or similar technologies.

• Deep knowledge and rich experience of open-source technology and tools in the big data area and experience applying them.

• Excellent leadership and partnership skills. Able to navigate through in a matrixed organization and influence technical direction and strategy.

• Excellent analytical skills; Capability in identifying and resolving complex problems.

• An understanding of and experience in payment organizations is a plus.

• Able to drive action and make clear decisions, leveraging analytics and test & learn. Understands how to recognize and recover quickly from failures, both as an individual and on behalf of the team.

• A mentor to individual contributors of different seniority levels and expertise.

• Ability to encourage and foster a culture of visibility and transparency across teams

• Strong written and verbal communication skills

• Strong philosophy of continuous improvement

• Bachelor degree in Computer Science or a related field. A higher degree like a Master or PhD in a related field is a plus.