AI Principal Engineer

WEX, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 250,300 - 289,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Retirement savings plan

Paid time off

Tuition reimbursement

Job summary

WEX, Inc. is looking for a Principal AI/ML Engineer to lead the design and implementation of a cloud-native AI/ML engineering platform. This role requires extensive experience in software development and AI technologies, with responsibilities including driving the technical vision and strategy to meet business needs.

The ideal candidate must have 15–20 years of experience, strong leadership skills, and be proficient in machine learning applications. This position offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 15–20 years of software design and development experience at a large scale.
• Strong software development skills in chosen programming language, willing to learn and program in Java and Python.
• Deep expertise in big data and large-scale data platforms, especially AI and ML.

Responsibilities

• Lead and drive the development of technology and platform for AI/ML engineering needs.
• Design architecture and lead implementation of AI/ML infrastructure.
• Partner with security and SRE orgs to ensure continuous improvement.

Skills

Software development

Machine learning models

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD automation

Education

Bachelor degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

Azure

SageMaker

Job description

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 is 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, ensuring functional richness, reliability, performance, and flexibility
• 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 technical solutions to effectively serve all the needs in the broad risk area of Wex
• Guide the team to leverage data and/or AI technology or tools in design and development for high productivity and better solution quality; show strong thought leadership and influence peers
• Closely partner with senior engineers across the organizations at Wex to deeply understand the business needs and jointly develop technical solutions; demonstrate strong thought leadership and partnership
• Partner closely with information security teams to ensure data security and privacy, 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 and systems, ensuring 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 development, quality, operations, and system performance status to management and partners
• Drive the technical vision and strategy of AI/ML infrastructure to serve near‑term and long‑term business needs; maintain close partnership with Data Science and ML Engineering teams and operational reporting teams of applications
• Set a high bar, provide technical guidance and effective training & mentorship to engineering teams in the group, including principles, skills, and best practices; uphold strong DORA metrics across the org; foster continuous learning and innovation; build an inclusive, productive, innovative, and engaging Risk group, including attracting high talent from the industry
  Guide the leaders in the group to do the same
• Set clear, measurable quality goals for the group in a data‑driven way
• Partner with security and SRE orgs to ensure continuous improvement and meeting of security requirements, SLOs, and error budgets
• Take strong financial responsibility for the team
• Hold team accountable for delivering quality results using defined OKRs
• Advise Senior Leadership on highly complex situations impacting the organization and lead teams through initiatives, driving quality results and achieving OKRs across the organization
• Provide strategic thought leadership on business initiatives using deep technical and business expertise

Qualifications & Experience

• A technically deep and innovative Software Engineer leader able to act and deliver to business needs
• 15–20 years of software design and development experience at a large scale
• Strong software development skills in chosen programming language, willing to learn and program in Java and Python
• Experience building supervised and unsupervised machine learning models; reinforcement learning experience a plus
• Experience with 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 services such as S3, EMR, Kubernetes, Lambda; experience in AWS and Azure highly desirable
• Hands‑on architecture design, development, deployment, and production operation; familiar with agile development and modern tools; strong engineering principles, automation and quality; full software development life cycle experience including production monitoring
• Deep expertise in big data and large‑scale data platforms, especially AI and ML
• Highly experienced and deep understanding of CI/CD automation
• Rich experience leading and guiding teams using combined engineering practice and agile development
• Excellent analytical skills; capable of identifying and resolving complex problems
• Understanding of and experience in payment organizations a plus
• Mentor to individual contributors of different seniority levels and expertise
• Ability to 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 related field; higher degree a plus

Leadership & Personal Characteristics

• Demonstrates a collaborative, engaging, mission‑driven style with good listening skills and gravitas; self‑confidence to interact with senior leadership and key stakeholders with humility, empathy, transparency, cultural sensitivity, and agility
• Champions a culture of high standards, pushes for progress, embraces change, challenges status quo based on integrity, partnership, and financial responsibility; uncompromising ethics and unwavering integrity
• Able to operate in fast‑paced entrepreneurial environment with hands‑on approach
• Communicates effectively in small and large group formats; articulates compelling vision and purpose that excites the team and drives performance and service delivery excellence
• Possesses intellectual curiosity and learning agility; natural change agent with vision and execution skills
• Understands nuance and drives change through influence across complex business; superb stakeholder management; comfortable in fast‑changing environment

Compensation & Benefits

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 qualifications, skills, competencies, and proficiency for the role. Base pay is one component of WEX's total compensation package. Non‑sales roles are eligible for a quarterly or annual bonus based on the 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. Pay Range: $250,300.00 - $289,000.00