Software Development Mgmt 5

About the team / Role

As a Director, Data Platform Engineering, you will be the primary leader and visionary for the core data infrastructure that powers the entire enterprise. This is a "platform-as-a-product" role; your mission is to lead the team building the internal foundation—creating the high-performance engines, abstraction layers, and self-service frameworks that enable hundreds of other engineers to move faster. You will manage a team operating at the intersection of Systems Programming and Data Engineering, solving "hard-tech" problems like automated schema evolution, multi-engine compute optimization, and global data discovery. As a top-level technical leader, you will bridge the gap between long-term business strategy and engineering execution, ensuring WEX’s data platform remains a competitive advantage.

Is this role for you?

- YES, if: You are an Engineering Manager or Lead Backend/Software Engineer who loves leading teams that solve "Big Data" problems, build APIs for data discovery, and optimize distributed systems.

- NO, if: Your primary expertise is managing teams that write SQL queries, build Tableau dashboards, or manage ETL workflows without deep experience in Java or Python system architecture.

How you'll make an impact

- Strategic Roadmap & Sovereignty: Define and execute the 3-5 year technical roadmap for the Data Lakehouse. You will guide your team in deciding how storage, compute, and metadata layers (e.g., Apache Polaris, Unity Catalog or Datahub Catalog) interact at an elemental level.

- Platform-as-a-Product Delivery: Lead the development of internal SDKs, CLI tools, and automated orchestration frameworks. Your goal is to ensure your team abstracts away cloud complexity via Control Planes and Custom Operators, allowing Data Engineers to focus on business logic rather than infrastructure boilerplate.

- Internal R&D Management: Champion and resource prototyping and benchmarking of emerging technologies (e.g., specialized Spark extensions) to keep the platform at the bleeding edge of performance and cost-efficiency.

- Global Governance & Security: Oversee the architecture of "compliance-by-design" systems. Ensure the team automates data lineage, PII masking, and fine-grained access control across petabyte-scale environments without sacrificing developer velocity.

- AI Governance Lake: Facilitate real-time data ingestion by implementing streaming support for Open Telemetry data from AI Agents into the Data Lake, drive the development of advanced AI evaluation metrics and reporting.