Senior Director, Risk 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

We are looking for a highly motivated, technically deep, and experienced Engineering leader to join and manage a group of high-performing engineers in the Risk area.

This is a really exciting time to be in risk technology at WEX. We are hiring for a cross-functional initiative with the goal of creating a modern, cloud-based technology ecosystem to allow WEX to be more nimble, faster to market, and open to emerging business opportunities, while keeping regulations, policy, and risk mitigation top of mind. We are in the process of building a powerful platform for risk operation & management, credit underwriting & management, finance risk operation & management, on top of our Data Platform and AI Platform, leveraging open source technologies as well as vendor platforms and tools.

The vision of this integrated risk platform is to enable streamlining how WEX interacts with customers - from creating accounts, maintaining and expanding relationships, and monitoring for good health and risk through a number of vectors. With strong risk control and management, this platform will allow Wex to more effectively grow our business and customer base in a much faster and safer way together with improved customer experience.

This Sr Director will report to the SVP of Data, AI, and Risk Technology, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. This role can also be in Chicago, Portland, Maine (Wex HQ), or Boston. An ideal candidate will have a rich experience in the Risk area and Risk Platform development, an established background in developing complex software platforms, a deep engineering skills and technical ability, outstanding people leadership with track record of growing/building strong and productive global teams, excellent project management skills, great communication skills, and a motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. This individual will have a strong track record of helping to deliver an effective, highly available, and flexible technology platform in a hyper-growth environment where priorities shift quickly.

Responsibilities

• Lead and drive the development of technology and platform for the company's Risk needs, ensure the functional richness, reliability, performance, and flexibility of the Risk Platform.

• Own the technology and architecture of the Risk 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.

• Closely partner with the leaders in the Risk Product org and the Risk & Compliance org to deeply understand the business needs and jointly come up with technical solutions to serve the business needs effectively. Demonstrate a strong thought leadership and partnership.

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

• Partner with other leaders in the Data, AI, and Risk org to leverage the Data, Data Platform, and AI Platform for the needs of Risk.

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

• 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 Risk to serve the business needs for the near term and long term. A close partnership with the Risk & Compliance team and Risk Product team is necessary here.

• 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.

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.

• Extensive experience in the risk area, including architecturing and developing Risk platforms.

• Good understanding and experience in Data and ML/AI, as well as applying those to solve risk problems.

• 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.

• Able to drive action and make 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 Risk 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.