Principal AI/ML Engineer - WEX : Job Details

Responsibilities

• Lead the development of technology and platform for the company's AI/ML engineering needs, ensuring functional richness, reliability, performance, and flexibility.
• Design the architecture and lead the implementation of AI/ML infrastructure, platform, and services.
• Challenge the status quo to drive better technical solutions in the broad risk area of Wex.
• Guide your team to leverage data and AI tools for high productivity and quality, demonstrating thought leadership.
• Partner with senior engineers across Wex to understand business needs and develop effective technical solutions.
• Collaborate with information security teams to ensure data security and privacy.
• Work with solutions architecture and LOB teams on integrations of AI/ML platforms, ensuring reliable execution.
• Engage with external partners to evaluate complementary technologies and services.
• Create and manage roadmaps, project plans, and commitments.
• Report on development, quality, operations, and system performance to management.
• Drive the technical vision and strategy for AI/ML infrastructure aligned with business needs, in partnership with Data Science, ML Engineering, and operations teams.
• Set high standards, provide technical guidance, training, and mentorship to engineering teams, fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
• Establish clear, measurable quality goals using data-driven approaches.
• Partner with security and SRE teams to meet security requirements, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Take financial responsibility for your team.
• Ensure accountability for delivering quality results through OKRs.
• Advise senior leadership on complex issues and lead teams through initiatives to achieve organizational OKRs.
• Provide strategic technical leadership on business initiatives using deep industry and technical expertise.

Qualifications & Experience

• Deep technical leadership in software engineering with the ability to meet business needs.
• 15-20 years of experience in large-scale software design and development.
• Strong skills in chosen programming languages with willingness to learn Java and Python.
• Experience in building supervised and unsupervised machine learning models; reinforcement learning experience is a plus.
• Experience with LLM models is advantageous.
• Broad understanding of distributed computing frameworks like Ray and Spark.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Experience with Sagemaker is a plus.
• Comprehensive understanding of cloud architecture tools (S3, EMR, Kubernetes, Lambda) with AWS and Azure experience preferred.
• Deep technical expertise in architecture, deployment, and production operations; familiar with agile development and best practices.
• Extensive experience with Big Data, large-scale data platforms, AI, and ML.
• Strong expertise in CI/CD automation.
• Leadership experience in engineering and agile practices.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Understanding of payment organizations is a plus.
• Mentorship skills for contributors at various levels.
• Ability to promote transparency and visibility across teams.
• Strong communication skills.
• Commitment to continuous improvement.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field; higher degrees are a plus.

Leadership & Personal Characteristics

• Collaborative, engaging leadership style with good listening skills, humility, empathy, and transparency.
• Advocate for high standards, progress, and ethical integrity.
• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment.
• Effective communicator capable of articulating a compelling vision.
• High intellectual curiosity and learning agility.
• Skilled in driving change through influence and managing stakeholders in complex environments.