Staff Data Acquisition Engineer (Remote) – Ingestion Lead

WEX Inc.; Maine; Hybrid; USD 141,000 - 173,000; Full time

Job summary

WEX Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Data Acquisition Team to own the technical direction of the data ingestion platform. The role is remote, but candidates must reside within 30 miles of Portland, ME; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; San Francisco Bay Area, CA; or Seattle, WA.

You will stay hands-on while guiding architecture decisions, building reusable ingestion connectors, and mentoring engineers across teams to ensure data quality, reliability, and cost effectiveness.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience including delivery of production distributed systems or data platforms.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, Scala, or another systems-focused language.
• Experience with data integration and ingestion pipelines; knowledge of bringing data from source systems to downstream consumers.
• Solid grasp of engineering fundamentals: version control, modular design, testing, and performance tuning.
• Experience designing and operating production integrations that handle schema evolution, failure recovery, observability, and secure access.
• Ability to lead architecture decisions, explain tradeoffs, resolve dependencies, and guide production adoption.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools for design, coding, testing, or documentation, with validation of outputs.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain high-performance data acquisition pipelines across systems and vendors.
• Lead design and delivery of a modular ingestion platform with reusable connectors.
• Establish metadata/configuration patterns to support Data Acquisition as a Service.
• Incorporate schema validation, reconciliation, and audit logging into shared components.
• Support safe retries, backfills, and schema evolution to protect data integrity.
• Design batch, CDC, and streaming ingestion patterns meeting freshness/recovery targets.
• Evaluate performance, source-system impact, and operating costs of ingestion tech.
• Ensure traceability, data lineage, and security through governance integrations.
• Lead reviews, maintain specs and architecture decisions, and mentor engineers.

Job description

WEX Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Data Acquisition Team to own the technical direction of the data ingestion platform. The role is remote, but candidates must reside within 30 miles of Portland, ME; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; San Francisco Bay Area, CA; or Seattle, WA.

You will stay hands-on while guiding architecture decisions, building reusable ingestion connectors, and mentoring engineers across teams to ensure data quality, reliability, and cost effectiveness.