Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform

WEX is an innovative global commerce platform and payments technology company looking to forge the way in a rapidly changing environment. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a key technical leader responsible for the design, implementation, and maintenance of WEX's data lake platform, driving the technical development to support both traditional analytics and next-generation AI/ML technologies.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the technical vision, architecture, and strategy for the Data Lake platform. Drive the development roadmap to deliver a platform that meets both near-term business needs and long-term strategic goals
• Design and lead the implementation of our data lake platform and services. Challenge the status quo, championing innovative technical solutions that leverage data, AI, and modern engineering practices
• Partner closely with solutions architecture, product, and engineering teams to deeply understand business needs and design effective solutions. Collaborate with information security to ensure data privacy and access controls are a core part of the platform's design
• Serve as a technical mentor to engineers, providing guidance on engineering principles, best practices, and skills. Foster a culture of continuous learning, innovation, and accountability for quality results
• Report on the status of development, quality, and system performance to management and partners. Advise senior leadership on complex technical initiatives and drive projects to achieve defined OKRs

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in software design and development, with a focus on building large-scale, distributed systems
• Strong hands-on experience in software development, architecture, deployment, and production operations, preferably with Java / J2EE (Spring/Spring Boot)
• Proficiency in languages like Python is highly desirable
• Deep expertise in building and operating Big Data platforms and large-scale data lakes
• Experience with Data Lakehouse formats such as Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi, or Delta Lake is a significant plus
• Strong understanding of modern data processing tools and services (e.g., Spark, AWS Glue, dbt, Apache Polaris)
• Extensive experience with cloud architecture and services, including AWS (S3, EMR, Kubernetes, Lambda) and Azure
• Deep understanding of CI/CD automation, modern development tools, and frameworks
• Proven ability to lead and guide engineering teams, acting as a technical mentor and thought leader
• Excellent analytical skills with a proven ability to identify and resolve complex technical problems
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a philosophy of continuous improvement
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field. A higher degree is a plus
• Creating reusable libraries, REST APIs, and services that abstract complexity and accelerate feature development for other data engineers and data scientists
• Taking end-to-end ownership of core platform components, including performance tuning, cost optimization, security hardening, and reliability improvements
• Deep familiarity with tools like Terraform or CloudFormation for provisioning and managing cloud-native data infrastructure
• Designing for operational stability, implementing robust monitoring, alerting, and logging systems, and driving adoption of self-service tooling
• Experience in building centralized governance, discovery, and quality tooling that enables decentralized data ownership (data domains)
• Experience designing, building, and optimizing modern ETL/ELT pipelines using tools like dbt, Apache Airflow, and cloud-native services