Principal Software Engineer, Data
WEX
full-time
Posted on:
Location: California, Illinois • 🇺🇸 United States
Visit company websiteSalary
💰 $195,000 - $260,000 per year
Job Level
Lead
Tech Stack
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 data is trusted, consistent, and usable across every business domain
Requirements
- 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
- Ability to set cross-domain architectural standards and influence adoption across 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