AI Principal Engineer

Overview

Principal AI/ML Engineer to lead the design and implementation of WEX's cloud-native AI/ML engineering platform, supporting both GenAI and traditional AI/ML technology and applications, with technical ownership of its architecture, direction, engineering best practice, and quality/compliance.

What you'll do

• Lead and drive the development of the 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 better technical solutions across the broad risk area of WEX.
• Guide your team to leverage data and/or AI technology or tools in design and development for high productivity and better solution quality.
• Show strong thought leadership and influence peers in this area.
• Closely partner with senior engineers across the organization to understand business needs and jointly develop technical solutions.
• Partner closely with information security teams to ensure the security and privacy of data, implementing encryption and access controls as required.
• Partner with solutions architecture and LOB product and engineering orgs on integrations of the AI/ML Platform with their products/systems, ensuring reliable and performant execution.
• 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 for the near and long term.
• Maintain a close partnership with the Data Science and ML Engineering teams and the operational reporting teams of applications.
• Set a high bar and provide technical guidance, training and mentorship to 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 group, including attracting high talent from the industry; guide 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.
• Take strong financial responsibility for your team.
• Hold yourself and your team accountable for delivering quality results using defined OKRs.
• Advise Senior Leadership on highly complex situations impacting the organization and lead teams through the resulting initiatives.
• Provide strategic thought leadership on business initiatives using deep technical and business industry expertise.

What you'll need

• 15-20 years of software design and development experience at a large scale.
• Strong software development skills in your chosen programming language, and willingness to learn and program in Java and Python.
• Good experience building machine learning supervised and unsupervised models.
• Broad understanding of distributed computing frameworks such as Ray and Spark.
• Demonstrable experience in Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Broad understanding of cloud architecture tools and services, such as S3, EMR, Kubernetes, and Lambda functions.
• Deep technical expertise, hands-on in architecture design, development, deployment, and production operation.
• Familiarity with agile software development and modern development tools and frameworks.
• Holds strong engineering principles including automation and quality, and best practices with a high bar.
• Extensive experience in the full software development life cycle end to end, including production monitoring.
• Rich experience and deep expertise in Big Data and large-scale data platforms, especially in AI and ML.
• Highly experienced with deep understanding of CI/CD automation.
• Rich experience in combined engineering practice and agile development, and experience leading and guiding teams using this approach.
• Excellent analytical skills and capability in identifying and resolving complex problems.
• Ability to mentor 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's degree in Computer Science or a related field.

Nice to have

• Experience in Reinforcement Learning.
• Experience using LLM models.
• Experience with SageMaker.
• Experience in AWS and Azure (highly desirable).
• An understanding of and experience in payment organizations.
• A higher degree in a related field.

Details

• Location: US, remote.
• Reports to the Vice President of Data Lake and AI Engineering, located in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• Pay range: $250,300.00 - $289,000.00 base pay.