Senior Platform Architect – Semantic Data & AI Systems

Jobtailor; California (MO); On-site; USD 160,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

WEX seeks a Senior Data Architect to define the architectural direction for our Semantic Data Lake and data-as-a-service offerings. You will design semantic objects combining data, context, relationships, and governance, while building scalable patterns across business lines.

You will mentor engineers, stay hands-on with critical platform components, and collaborate with Product, AI, Analytics, and Risk teams to deliver robust, reusable platform capabilities.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, distributed systems, data platforms, or related technology areas.
• Experience operating at Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical scope.
• Deep software engineering and distributed systems expertise.
• Experience designing and building large-scale production platforms.
• Deep understanding of modern data architecture, including large-scale data processing, streaming, lakehouse architectures, data products, and distributed systems.
• Deep understanding of semantic data technologies and industry direction.
• Experience with semantic modeling, ontology, metadata platforms, knowledge graphs, data catalogs, enterprise data modeling, or related technologies.
• Ability to translate complex business concepts into scalable technical abstractions and reusable platform capabilities.
• Strong understanding of data quality, governance, lineage, security, privacy, and operational reliability.
• Experience building platforms adopted by multiple engineering teams, business domains, or product organizations.
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to reason through complex tradeoffs.
• Ability to influence technical direction and drive alignment across teams and organizational boundaries.
• Strong communication skills.
• Preferred: experience building platforms supporting AI/ML, generative AI, RAG, or agentic applications.
• Preferred: knowledge representation, semantic search, context engineering, graph technologies, or AI-ready enterprise data.
• Preferred: modernizing large enterprise data ecosystems.
• Preferred: Spark, Flink, Kafka, Iceberg, Snowflake, Databricks, cloud-native data services, graph databases, or equivalent technologies.
• Preferred: defining reusable frameworks, APIs, standards, or platform capabilities broadly adopted beyond an individual team.

Responsibilities

• Define and influence architecture and technical direction for semantic data platforms.
• Design semantic objects and reusable platform capabilities.
• Develop scalable patterns for semantic modeling across lines of business.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance.
• Remain hands-on with architecture, design, and prototyping.

Skills

Semantic Data Technologies

Distributed Systems

Data Engineering

Architectural Design

Technical Leadership

Mentoring Engineers

Communication Skills

APIs & Frameworks

Data Governance

Data Quality

Tools

Spark

Flink

Kafka

Iceberg

Snowflake

Databricks

Graph Databases

Cloud-Native Data Services

Job description

WEX seeks a Senior Data Architect to define the architectural direction for our Semantic Data Lake and data-as-a-service offerings. You will design semantic objects combining data, context, relationships, and governance, while building scalable patterns across business lines.

You will mentor engineers, stay hands-on with critical platform components, and collaborate with Product, AI, Analytics, and Risk teams to deliver robust, reusable platform capabilities.