Principal Software Engineer, AI-Driven Data Platform

WEX; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 201,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Dental & Vision

Retirement plan

Job summary

WEX is pursuing a Principal Software Engineer to shape a next‑generation Data‑as‑a‑Service platform. You will lead semantic modeling, knowledge graphs, and enterprise data integration while mentoring engineers and delivering scalable, reliable systems.

You will collaborate with product, AI, analytics, risk, and finance teams to translate complex concepts into durable data models and reusable platform capabilities, driving AI‑ready data products across business domains.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, distributed systems, or related tech areas at staff/principal level or equivalent.
• Deep software engineering and distributed systems expertise for large-scale production platforms.
• Strong understanding of modern data architecture including lakehouse, data products, and distributed systems.
• Semantic data technologies and building a semantic data layer is highly valued.
• Experience with semantic modeling, ontology, metadata platforms, knowledge graphs, and data catalogs.
• Ability to translate complex business concepts into scalable technical abstractions and reusable platform capabilities.
• Strong focus on data quality, governance, lineage, security, privacy, and reliability.
• Experience building platforms adopted by multiple teams or product domains.
• Excellent architectural judgment and ability to move from high-level design to implementation details.
• Strong communication for cross-team alignment and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Define the architecture and technical direction for WEX's Semantic Data Lake and Data as a Service platform.
• Design and build semantic business objects that integrate data, context, relationships, metrics, and lineage.
• Develop scalable patterns for semantic objects across lines of business while maintaining enterprise standards.
• Build core capabilities in semantic modeling, ontology, metadata, knowledge graphs, data quality, and governance.
• Collaborate with business and product teams to translate concepts into durable technical models and reusable platform features.
• Capture cross-database and cross-application business context to inform platforms.
• Enable AI and agentic applications to discover, understand, and act on trusted enterprise data.
• Design reusable APIs, services, and developer experiences to accelerate data products and AI experiences.
• Address complex distributed systems, data processing, scalability, reliability, and performance challenges.
• Establish engineering patterns and standards and influence adoption without direct authority.
• Mentor engineers and provide hands-on architecture, prototyping, and critical component work.

Skills

Distributed systems

Semantic data

Knowledge graphs

Data modeling

Architectural patterns

Mentoring

Hands-on coding

APIs design

Data governance

Data platforms

Tools

Spark

Flink

Kafka

Iceberg

Snowflake

Databricks

Job description

WEX is pursuing a Principal Software Engineer to shape a next‑generation Data‑as‑a‑Service platform. You will lead semantic modeling, knowledge graphs, and enterprise data integration while mentoring engineers and delivering scalable, reliable systems.

You will collaborate with product, AI, analytics, risk, and finance teams to translate complex concepts into durable data models and reusable platform capabilities, driving AI‑ready data products across business domains.