Principal Software Engineer, Data

WEX

full-time

Posted on: 9/21/2025

Origin: • 🇺🇸 United States • California, Illinois

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💰 $195,000 - $260,000 per year

Lead

AirflowCloudDistributed SystemsKafkaRaySpark

About the role

Architect the DaaS platform end-to-end: Define the next generation of WEX’s enterprise data stack spanning ingestion, semantic data modeling, metadata, and product delivery.
Establish platform standards: Set reusable frameworks for ingestion, modeling, lineage, observability, and access control.
Guide technical strategy at scale: Partner with senior engineering, product, and business leaders to align data architecture with strategic objectives.
Solve for scale, reliability, and trust: Design systems that handle billions of records, guarantee semantic consistency, and deliver auditable, governed data assets.
Mentor and multiply: Coach senior staff engineers and architects, instilling best practices in distributed systems, platform reliability, and semantic clarity.
Drive innovation: Explore and incorporate modern open-source and cloud-native technologies (e.g., Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, Delta, DBT, Ray, ML-ready data services).
Be the bridge: Collaborate across Data Acquisition, Semantic Modeling, Data Products, and Governance teams to ensure trusted, consistent, and usable data across business domains.

12–15+ years of experience in software or platform engineering
Proven track record of building and scaling large-scale data platforms
Expertise in distributed systems, data acquisition, and semantic modeling
Architectural ownership of systems processing tens of millions to billions of records per day
Demonstrated ability to set cross-domain architectural standards and influence multiple engineering teams
Strong background in data lifecycle management (versioning, auditability, observability, lineage, reproducibility)
Deep experience with modern data ecosystems: streaming (Kafka, Flink), batch (Spark, DBT), storage (Iceberg, Delta), orchestration (Airflow, Dagster), and APIs
Exceptional communication and leadership skills
Passion for creating platforms that endure for analytics, AI, and products enterprise-wide