AI-First Database Architect – Legacy Modernization

WEX, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Retirement savings plan

Paid time off

Tuition reimbursement

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Job summary

WEX, Inc. in San Francisco seeks a Senior Database Architect to modernize legacy databases and architect AI-native data infrastructure. You will decompose large stored procedures and design vector databases, embedding strategies, and semantic models for AI agents and workflows.

This AI-first role blends solving hard legacy DB problems with building data layers for AI-native applications, offering leadership in domain-driven design and cross-team collaboration.

Qualifications

• 8-12 years in database engineering and architecture, with enterprise SQL Server experience.
• Deep SQL Server expertise: T-SQL optimization, stored procedure refactoring, indexing, and performance tuning.
• Modernization experience: decomposing complex stored procedures and migrating logic to services.
• Multi-platform data architecture across SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cosmos DB, Snowflake.
• Event-driven data patterns: CDC, Kafka, outbox, event sourcing, CQRS.

Responsibilities

• Analyze and decompose large SQL Server stored procedures with embedded business logic.
• Design patterns to separate business rules from data access.
• Lead refactoring aligning structures with domain-driven design.
• Implement event-driven patterns to decouple DB dependencies.
• Optimize queries, indexing, and execution plans.
• Create migration playbooks and tooling for modernization.
• Design semantic data models for AI retrieval.
• Architect vector DB solutions for RAG with embeddings and similarity search.

Skills

SQL Server

T-SQL optimization

Stored procedures

Data modeling

Vector databases

Embedding pipelines

Event-driven patterns

Cross-platform DB design

Tools

SQL Server

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Cosmos DB

Snowflake

Pinecone

Weaviate

pgvector

Azure AI Search

Kafka

Job description

WEX, Inc. in San Francisco seeks a Senior Database Architect to modernize legacy databases and architect AI-native data infrastructure. You will decompose large stored procedures and design vector databases, embedding strategies, and semantic models for AI agents and workflows.

This AI-first role blends solving hard legacy DB problems with building data layers for AI-native applications, offering leadership in domain-driven design and cross-team collaboration.