Sr Director, Data Lake Engineering

Senior Director, Data Lake Engineering

Company Overview

WEX is an innovative global commerce platform and payments technology company looking to forge the way in a rapidly changing environment, to simplify the business of doing business for customers, freeing them to spend more time, with less worry, on the things they love and care about. We are journeying to build a consistent world-class user experience across our products and services and leverage customer-focused innovations across all our strategic initiatives, including big data, AI, and Risk.

Position Summary

As the Senior Director of Data Lake Engineering, this leader will be responsible for the vision and strategy of the Data Lake platform (supporting both GenAI and traditional AI/ML technology and applications), AI model productionalization (E2E AI/ML model production lifecycle: AI/ML model development, deployment, monitoring, refresh, etc), DataLake, and related technology, systems, and tools. This leader 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's 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 technical leader to apply deep expertise and rich experience in the Data Lake and related areas 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 leader will have technical ownership of WEX's Data Lake platform/infrastructure & services, 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 Data, AI, and Risk Technology (DART) org in a hands-on way, and provide guidance and coaches.

The vision behind Wex's Data Lake is to create a unified, scalable, and intelligent data infrastructure that empowers our organization to unlock the full potential of our data. At its core, the Data Lake is designed to serve as the foundation for modern data management, enabling us to ingest, store, process, and analyze vast amounts of diverse data from across the enterprise. This vision is centered on three primary goals: data democratization, agility and scalability, and advanced insights and innovation including fully havesting the power of AI technology.

We are looking for a highly motivated, technically deep, and experienced Engineering leader to join the org to grow and manage a group of high-performing engineers in the Data Lake and AI engineering area.

This Sr Director will report to the VP of AI and Data Lake 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 Data Lake needs, ensure the functional richness, reliability, performance, and flexibility of the Data Lake Platform.

• Own the technology and architecture of the Data Lake platform and services.

• Challenge the status quo and hold a high bar to drive for better and better technical solutions to effectively serve all the needs in the broad risk area of Wex.

• Guide your team to leverage data and/or AI technology or tools in your design and development for high productivity and better solution quality. Show strong thought leadership and influence your peers in this area.

• Closely partner with the leaders across the organizations at Wex to deeply understand the business needs and jointly come up with technical solutions to serve these needs effectively. Demonstrate strong thought leadership and partnership.

• Grow and build a strong global Data Lake engineering team, including high talent attraction and hiring. Provide effective guidance and coaching on engineering principles and best practices including agile development methodology to ensure team productivity, high quality, and timeliness in initiative development and delivery. Ensure reliable Data Lake platform production execution and needed observability, and provide clear visibility to partners.

• Establish data governance policies, data quality metrics, and data access protocols to ensure compliance with industry regulations and internal security standards.

• Partner closely with information security teams to ensure the security and privacy of data, implementing encryption and access controls as required.

• Partner with solutions architecture and LOB product and engineering orgs on integrations of the Data Lake Platform with their products/systems, and ensure reliable and performed execution.

• Engage with external partners and vendors to evaluate technologies and services that complement the company's Data Lake strategy.

• Create, prioritize, communicate, manage, and execute roadmaps, project plans, and commitments.

• Report on the status of development, quality, operations, and system performance to management and partners.

• Drive the technical vision and strategy of Data Lake to serve the business needs for the near term and long term. A close partnership with the Data Engineering teams and the operational reporting teams of applications

• Set a high bar, and provide technical guidance and effective training & mentorship to the engineering teams in your group, including engineering principles, skills, and best practices. Uphold strong DORA metrics across the org. Foster an environment of continuous learning and innovation. Build an inclusive, productive, innovative, and engaging Risk group, including attracting high talents from the industry.
  Guide the leaders in your group to do the same.

• Set clear, measurable quality goals for your group in a data-driven way

• Partner with the security org and SRE org to ensure continuous improvement and meeting of security requirements, SLOs, and error budget.

• Take strong financial responsibility for your team.

• Hold yourself and your team accountable for delivering quality results using defined OKRs.

• Advise Senior Leadership team on highly complex situations that impact our organization and then lead teams through the initiative, driving excellent quality results and achieving defined OKRs across the organization.

• Provide strategic thought leadership on business initiatives using your deep technical and business industry expertise.

Qualifications & Experience

• A technically deep, innovative, empathetic, and passionate leader able to act and deliver to the business needs.

• Have 10+ years of software design and development experience at a large scale, with 5+ years of people management experience of high effective and productive teams.

• Deep technically; hands-on in architecture design, development, deployment, and production operation; familiar with agile software development and modern development tools and frameworks; holding strong engineering principles including automation and quality as well as best practices with a high bar. Extensive experience in full software development life cycle E2E including in production monitoring.

• Rich experience and deep expertise in the areas of Big Data and large scale data platforms, especially in Data Lake.

• Highly experienced and deep understanding of CI/CD automation.

• Rich experience in combined engineering practice and agile development. Experienced in leading and guiding teams for effective development using this approach.

• Broad understanding of cloud architecture tools and services, such as S3, EMR, Kubernetes, Lambda functions. Experience in AWS and Azure is highly desirable.

• Excellent leadership, organizational, and partnership skills. Able to navigate through in a matrixed organization and influence technical direction and strategy.

• Experience leading global teams. Demonstrated track record of growing and attracting top engineering talent.

• Excellent analytical skills; Capability in identifying and resolving complex problems.

• An understanding of and experience in payment organizations is a plus.

• Strong in driving action and making clear decisions, leveraging analytics and test & learn. Understands how to recognize and recover quickly from failures, both as an individual and on behalf of the team.

• A mentor to individual contributors of different seniority levels and expertise.

• Ability to encourage and 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 a related field. A higher degree in a related field is a plus.

Leadership & Personal Characteristics

Beyond experience, the right leadership competencies and personal style are critical to success as the Sr Director of Data Lake engineering. The candidate will model WEX's commitment to innovation, integrity, execution, relationships, community, and the excellence that they commit to their customers. They will have a strong corporate stewardship philosophy and leadership style combined with the following:

• Demonstrates a collaborative, engaging, mission-driven style with good listening skills combined with gravitas and self-confidence in order to effectively interact with senior leadership and other key constituencies with humility, empathy, transparency, cultural sensitivity, and agility.

• Champions a culture of high standards, pushes for progress, embraces change and challenges the status quo based on integrity, strong partnership and financial responsibility. Possess uncompromising ethics and unwavering integrity.

• Able to operate in a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment with a hands-on approach.

• Leads with empathy. Recognizes others, listens intently, holds others accountable, and makes diversity and inclusion a priority. Promotes a culture of trust, transparency, fairness, innovation, collaboration, inclusion, and diversity of thought; empowers individuals.

• Communicates effectively in small and large group formats. Able to articulate a compelling vision and purpose that excites the team and drives outstanding performance and service delivery excellence.

• Talent magnet, talent developer and talent scout that proactively engages external talent and builds and nurtures internal talent; empowers individuals and manages diverse teams to drive engagement and performance.

• Possesses a high level of intellectual curiosity and learning agility. A natural change agent with a combination of vision and execution skills.

• Understands nuance and how to drive change through influence across a complex business. Superb stakeholder management and comfortable operating in a fast-changing environment.