AI Principal Engineer

Position Summary

As a Principal AI/ML engineer, this technical leader will be responsible for the design and implementation of the cloud-native AI/ML engineering platform (supporting both GenAI and traditional AI/ML technology and applications). This technologist will drive the technology development and architecture in these areas to ensure the platforms, systems, tools, models, and services generated from this team are technically sound with strong security, quality, reliability, usability, scalability, performance, efficiency, and operability to serve the fast growing needs of Wex and customers. It’s important to balance the near term and long term needs. To do these, you will be closely partnering with other leaders and teams in the Tech org, Digital org, and other orgs in the company including Data & Analytics, Risk & Compliance, the Line of Business (LOB) 3 legs (commercial, digital, and technology), Security, central architecture & PaaS team, Global Tech Services, Finance, Marketing, and customer service orgs to understand their business and needs for Data Lake technologies, platforms, services, and guide our design, development, and productionalization accordingly. 

This is a fantastic opportunity for a highly motivated and passionate AI/ML engineer to apply deep expertise and rich experience in AI Engineering to develop technology, platforms and services, and apply them to multiple lines of business with a big customer base to generate real business impact in a fast growing commerce platform and payment tech company during its technology transformation stage to meet high customer demands. At the same time, you will learn and grow your career by solving large scale and complex problems.

This Principal AI/ML Engineer will have technical ownership of WEX’s AI Engineering implementation, including but not limited to architecture, technical direction, engineering best practice, and quality/compliance. This also includes proper and effective architectural integration with other platforms, products, and services across the company. This leader will work closely with team members of the Data Lakehouse Engineering teams.

The vision behind Wex’s AI/ML engineering is to create a unified, scalable, and intelligent data and compute infrastructure that empowers our organization to unlock the full potential of our data.

We are looking for a highly motivated, technically deep, and experienced Software Engineer to join the org and design, architect the AI/ML engineering applications and frameworks for Wex.

This Principal AI/ML Engineer will report to the Vice President of Data Lake and AI Engineering located in the San Francisco Bay Area. This role can also be in Chicago, Portland, Maine (Wex HQ), or Boston.  The ideal candidate will be a hands-on leader with deep technical expertise in building and scaling data lake environments, coupled with strong people leadership and communication skills to drive alignment across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Lead and drive the development of technology and platform for the company's AI/ML engineering needs, ensure the functional richness, reliability, performance, and flexibility of this platform

• Help design the architecture and lead the implementation of the AI/ML infrastructure, platform and services.

• 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 risk area of Wex. 

• Guide your team to leverage data and/or AI technology or tools in your design and development for high productivity and better solution quality. Show strong thought leadership and influence your peers in this area.

• Closely partner with the other senior engineers across the organizations at Wex to deeply understand the business needs and jointly come up with technical solutions to serve these needs effectively. Demonstrate strong thought leadership and partnership.

• Partner closely with information security teams to ensure the security and privacy of data, implementing encryption and access controls as required.

• Partner with solutions architecture and LOB product and engineering orgs on integrations of the AI/ML Platform with their products/systems, and ensure reliable and performed execution.

• Engage with external partners and vendors to evaluate technologies and services that complement the company’s AI/ML strategy.

• Create, prioritize, communicate, manage, and execute roadmaps, project plans, and commitments.

• Report on the status of development, quality, operations, and system performance to management and partners.

• Drive the technical vision and strategy of AI/ML infrastructure to serve the business needs for the near term and long term. A close partnership with the Data Science and ML Engineering teams and the operational reporting teams of applications 

• Set a high bar, and provide technical guidance and effective training & mentorship to the engineering teams in your 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 Risk group, including attracting high talents from the industry.
  Guide the leaders in your group to do the same.

• Set clear, measurable quality goals for your group in a data-driven way

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

• Take strong financial responsibility for your team.

• Hold yourself and your team accountable for delivering quality results using defined OKRs.

• Advise Senior Leadership team on highly complex situations that impact our organization and then lead teams through the initiative, driving excellent quality results and achieving defined OKRs across the organization.

• Provide strategic thought leadership on business initiatives using your deep technical and business industry expertise.

Qualifications & Experience

• A technically deep and innovative Software Engineer leader able to act and deliver to the business needs.

• Have 15-20 years of software design and development experience at a large scale.

• Strong software development skills in his or her chosen programming language, but ready and willing to learn and program in Java and Python.

• Good experience in building machine learning supervised and unsupervised models. Experience in Reinforcement Learning is a plus.

• Experience in using LLM models a plus

• Broad understanding of distributed computing frameworks like Ray and Spark

• Demonstrable experience in Kubernetes and Terraform

• Experience with Sagemaker a plus

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

• Deep technically; hands-on in architecture design, development, deployment, and production operation; familiar with agile software development and modern development tools and frameworks; 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.

• Rich experience and deep expertise in the areas of Big Data and large scale data platforms, especially in AI and ML.

• Highly experienced and deep understanding of CI/CD automation.

• Rich experience in combined engineering practice and agile development. Experienced in leading and guiding teams for effective development using this approach.

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

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

• 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 in a related field is a plus.

Leadership & Personal Characteristics

Beyond experience, the right technical leadership competencies and personal style are critical to success as the Principal AI/ML Engineer. The candidate will model WEX's commitment to innovation, integrity, execution, relationships, community, and the excellence that they commit to their customers. They will have a strong corporate stewardship philosophy and leadership style combined with the following:

• Demonstrates a collaborative, engaging, mission-driven style with good listening skills combined with gravitas and self-confidence in order to effectively interact with senior leadership and other key constituencies with humility, empathy, transparency, cultural sensitivity, and agility.

• Champions a culture of high standards, pushes for progress, embraces change and challenges the status quo based on integrity, strong partnership and financial responsibility. Possess uncompromising ethics and unwavering integrity.

• Able to operate in a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment with a hands-on approach.

• Communicates effectively in small and large group formats. Able to articulate a compelling vision and purpose that excites the team and drives outstanding performance and service delivery excellence. 

• Possesses a high level of intellectual curiosity and learning agility. A natural change agent with a combination of vision and execution skills.

• Understands nuance and how to drive change through influence across a complex business. Superb stakeholder management and comfortable operating in a fast-changing environment.

The base pay range represents the anticipated low and high end of the pay range for this position. Actual pay rates will vary and will be based on various factors, such as your qualifications, skills, competencies, and proficiency for the role. Base pay is one component of WEX's total compensation package. Most sales positions are eligible for commission under the terms of an applicable plan. Non-sales roles are typically eligible for a quarterly or annual bonus based on their role and applicable plan. WEX's comprehensive and market competitive benefits are designed to support your personal and professional well-being. Benefits include health, dental and vision insurances, retirement savings plan, paid time off, health savings account, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability insurance, tuition reimbursement, and more. For more information, check out the "About Us" section.Pay Range: $250,300.00 - $289,000.00