Senior Staff Engineer - Data Acquisition (San Francisco)

This is a remote position; however, the candidate must reside within 30 miles of one of the following locations: Portland, ME; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; San Francisco Bay Area, CA; and Seattle/WA.

About The Team/Role

As WEX continues to scale its Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform, the Data Acquisition Team plays a critical role in enabling secure, scalable, and reliable ingestion of data from hundreds of internal systems and external sources.

We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to architect and lead the next evolution of our data acquisition platform. In this role, you will drive the design of a flexible, extensible ingestion framework that supports batch, streaming, and event-driven pipelines, while ensuring data quality, observability, and governance are built in from the start.

This role is ideal for engineers who want to work on foundational platform problems at scale—helping ingest billions of records across diverse systems and powering enterprise-wide analytics, AI, and product experiences. This team sits at the front door of WEX’s data platform—powering everything downstream. You’ll help design the systems that make the rest of the architecture possible: scalable, governed, and intelligent from day one. If you want to work on problems of scale, reliability, and interoperability—this is your role.

How you’ll make an impact

• Lead the design and development of scalable, high-throughput data acquisition systems that integrate internal and external data sources across domains.
• Architect core platform components—such as data routing, transformation orchestration, lineage tracking, and schema evolution—using sound software engineering principles.
• Implement a modular ingestion framework capable of supporting streaming and batch pipelines with varying latencies and SLAs.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, and establish best practices in code quality, performance optimization, testing, and platform observability.
• Collaborate with domain teams to understand data integration needs and accelerate onboarding through reusable patterns and automation.
• Partner closely with the Control Plane and DataOps teams to integrate orchestration, lineage, access control, and validation into the core ingestion process.

Experience you’ll bring

• 10+ years of experience in software or platform engineering with a focus on distributed systems, high-volume data processing, or data platform architecture.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field required, Masters degree preferred.
• Deep understanding of data acquisition patterns at scale—including change data capture (CDC), event-driven ingestion, streaming frameworks, and asynchronous integration models.
• Strong architectural experience with large-scale systems—you’ve built or led platforms that handle tens of millions to billions of records per day.
• Experience building internal data platforms or ingestion frameworks that abstract complexity and accelerate domain adoption.
• Strong programming expertise in a systems language (e.g., Python, Java, Scala, or Go).
• Strong appreciation for platform reliability, security, testability, and documentation as part of scalable engineering. Experience integrating with a variety of source systems (e.g., CRM, ERP, telemetry, external APIs), and solving for schema evolution, observability, and error recovery.
• Excellent communication skills and a passion for building platforms that empower others

The base pay range represents the anticipated low and high end of the pay range for this position. Actual pay rates will vary and will be based on various factors, such as your qualifications, skills, competencies, and proficiency for the role. Base pay is one component of WEX's total compensation package. Most sales positions are eligible for commission under the terms of an applicable plan. Non-sales roles are typically eligible for a quarterly or annual bonus based on their role and applicable plan. WEX's comprehensive and market competitive benefits are designed to support your personal and professional well-being. Benefits include health, dental and vision insurances, retirement savings plan, paid time off, health savings account, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability insurance, tuition reimbursement, and more. For more information, check out the About Us section.