AI Principal Engineer

Role Description

As a Principal AI/ML engineer, this technical leader will be responsible for the design and implementation of the cloud-native AI/ML engineering platform (supporting both GenAI and traditional AI/ML technology and applications). This technologist 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.

This Principal AI/ML Engineer will have technical ownership of WEX’s AI Engineering implementation, 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.

The vision behind Wex’s AI/ML engineering is to create a unified, scalable, and intelligent data and compute infrastructure that empowers our organization to unlock the full potential of our data.

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 AI/ML engineering needs, ensuring functional richness, reliability, performance, and flexibility.
• Help design the architecture and lead the implementation of the AI/ML infrastructure, platform, and services.
• Challenge the status quo and hold a high bar to drive for better technical solutions 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.
• Partner closely with other senior engineers across the organizations at Wex to understand business needs and jointly develop technical solutions.
• Partner closely with information security teams to ensure the security and privacy of data.
• Partner with solutions architecture and LOB product and engineering orgs on integrations of the AI/ML Platform.
• Engage with external partners and vendors to evaluate technologies and services that complement the company’s AI/ML 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 AI/ML infrastructure to serve business needs.
• Set a high bar, provide technical guidance and effective training & mentorship to the engineering teams.
• 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.
• 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.
• Provide strategic thought leadership on business initiatives using your deep technical and business industry expertise.

Qualifications

• A technically deep and innovative Software Engineer leader able to act and deliver to the business needs.
• 15-20 years of software design and development experience at a large scale.
• Strong software development skills in chosen programming language, ready to learn and program in Java and Python.
• Good experience in building machine learning supervised and unsupervised models; experience in Reinforcement Learning is a plus.
• Experience in using LLM models is a plus.
• Broad understanding of distributed computing frameworks like Ray and Spark.
• Demonstrable experience in Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Experience with Sagemaker is a plus.
• Broad understanding of cloud architecture tools and services, such as S3, EMR, Kubernetes, Lambda functions; experience in AWS and Azure is highly desirable.
• Deep technically; hands-on in architecture design, development, deployment, and production operation.
• Rich experience and deep expertise in the areas of Big Data and large scale data platforms, especially in AI and ML.
• Highly experienced and deep understanding of CI/CD automation.
• Rich experience in combined engineering practice and agile development.
• Excellent analytical skills; capability in identifying and resolving complex problems.
• An understanding of and experience in payment organizations is a plus.
• A mentor to individual contributors of different seniority levels and expertise.
• 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

• Demonstrates a collaborative, engaging, mission-driven style with good listening skills.
• Champions a culture of high standards, embraces change and challenges the status quo.
• Able to operate in a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment with a hands-on approach.
• Communicates effectively in small and large group formats.
• Possesses a high level of intellectual curiosity and learning agility.
• Understands nuance and how to drive change through influence across a complex business.

Benefits

• 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.

Pay Range

$250,300.00 - $289,000.00