Sr Director, Payments SRE
About The Position
WEX is seeking a senior technical leader to define and execute the reliability engineering vision for its payments platform ecosystem. The platforms process high-volume, low-latency transactions and generate complex telemetry and operational data, making reliability, scalability, and efficiency essential to protecting transaction integrity and customer trust. The Senior Director will lead complex, cross-functional initiatives in observability, incident and problem management, automation, performance optimization, and capacity planning. The role includes architecting resilient systems, designing proactive reliability strategies, and building frameworks and tooling that advance operational excellence across the company. As a strategic partner to engineering, product, and platform leadership, this leader will set direction, influence architecture, and embed SRE principles throughout the development lifecycle. They will mentor engineers and engineering leaders, scale best practices, and foster reliability, continuous improvement, and innovation. The organization uses modern technologies, AI, and automation within an agile, product-centric engineering model.
Requirements
- 15 years of experience in software engineering.
- 7 years of engineering management experience managing managers and individual contributors.
- Deep experience in cloud-native architecture and large-scale distributed systems.
- Deep expertise in system design, automation, and performance optimization.
- Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, service meshes, and distributed tracing.
- Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration, including Docker and Kubernetes.
- Experience with monitoring and logging platforms such as Grafana, ELK stack, or Splunk, or similar.
- Strong understanding of database reliability engineering, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and NoSQL, and of networking and storage architectures.
- Proven experience with high-availability, low-latency systems and workloads requiring transactional integrity and consistency.
- Excellent incident command and crisis management skills.
- Strong experience with regulatory and compliance frameworks.
- Exceptional leadership skills and a proven track record of driving reliability improvements.
- Skilled at managing distributed teams and fostering psychological safety in high-stakes environments.
Nice To Haves
- Understanding of PCI-DSS compliance and secure handling of payment data.
- Experience with real-time monitoring of payment flows and exceptions, partner and payment-gateway integrations, and failure recovery and idempotency in financial transactions.
- Familiarity with end-of-day reconciliation and cutoff schedules.
- Deep expertise in AI/ML for anomaly detection and predictive analytics in observability, with a track record of applying AI to significant Site Reliability and Operations problems.
- Strong financial acumen in cost optimization and cloud-spend strategies.
- Proven ability to align SRE practices with business goals and influence C-level executives on reliability strategy.
- Track record of building and leading SRE organizations across multiple domains or product lines.
- Ability to define and institutionalize reliability practices, including standardized SLOs, blameless culture, and incident communications.
- Strong organizational and stakeholder-management skills across Engineering, Product, and Executive teams.
- Recognized thought leader with SRE publications or conference talks.
Responsibilities
- Set the vision and organization-level strategy for SRE across reliability, observability, automation, and incident management.
- Shape and scale the SRE function across multiple payments domains, leading SRE managers and senior individual contributors.
- Lead development of solutions to complex reliability challenges in high-availability, low-latency payment systems.
- Drive cultural transformation that prioritizes reliability, operational excellence, blameless practices, and continuous improvement.
- Ensure business continuity, disaster recovery, and compliance across the payments platform.
- Build and maintain relationships with executive stakeholders; represent SRE in executive forums, reviews, and strategic planning sessions.
- Represent WEX in industry forums and conferences as a reliability engineering thought leader.
- Drive hiring strategy, headcount planning, and long-term team capability growth.
- Influence architecture and embed SRE principles across the development lifecycle.
- Mentor engineers and engineering leaders and scale SRE best practices.
Benefits
- Health insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Retirement savings plan
- Paid time off
- Health savings account
- Flexible spending accounts
- Life insurance
- Disability insurance
- Tuition reimbursement
- Quarterly or annual bonus eligibility for non-sales roles, subject to role and applicable plan
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
