Senior Director, Semantic Data Platform

WEX•California, MD

22h•$230,800 - $283,600

About The Position

WEX is reimagining its enterprise data platform with an ambitious goal: make our data understandable not only to people and applications, but also to AI models and autonomous agents. We are looking for a Senior Director to lead the next generation of our Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform and build the semantic foundation that connects data with its business meaning. This leader will define and drive how WEX creates trusted semantic objects for our major business domains—such as customers, accounts, merchants, transactions, vehicles, payments, claims, and risk signals. These objects will bring together data, relationships, business definitions, derived attributes, policies, lineage, and context into reusable assets that can power analytics, data products, decisioning, and AI experiences. This is a highly visible leadership role. You will lead a team of senior engineers and technical leaders while partnering closely with Product, AI, Analytics, Risk, Finance, and business teams across WEX. The space is evolving quickly. We are not looking for someone who has already built an exact version of this platform. We are looking for a leader with deep data and platform experience, strong technical judgment, and the ability to help invent what the next generation of enterprise data platforms should become in an AI-native world.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, distributed systems, data platforms, or related technology areas, including significant technical leadership experience.
Experience leading engineering organizations responsible for large-scale data, platform, infrastructure, or developer capabilities.
Deep understanding of modern data architecture, including large-scale data processing, streaming, lakehouse architectures, data products, and distributed systems.
Deep understanding of semantic data technologies and industry direction is essential. Direct experience building a semantic data layer is strongly recommended.
Demonstrated ability to translate complex business concepts into scalable technical abstractions and reusable platform capabilities.
Strong understanding of data quality, governance, lineage, security, privacy, and operational reliability.
Experience building platforms adopted by multiple engineering teams, business domains, or product organizations.
Strong architectural judgment with the ability to evaluate tradeoffs and move comfortably between long-term strategy and detailed technical discussions.
Demonstrated ability to influence senior technical, product, and business leaders across organizational boundaries.
Experience hiring, mentoring, and developing senior engineering talent and technical leaders.
Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineering teams, business partners, and executive leadership.

Nice To Haves

Experience building platforms that support AI/ML, generative AI, RAG, or agentic applications.
Experience with knowledge representation, semantic search, context engineering, graph technologies, or AI-ready enterprise data.
Experience modernizing large enterprise data ecosystems with multiple business domains and legacy systems.
Experience driving a significant platform transformation from concept through enterprise adoption.
The most important qualification is not familiarity with a particular tool or architecture. We are looking for a leader who can combine deep engineering expertise, business understanding, and first-principles thinking to help define how enterprise data should work in an AI-native future.

Responsibilities

Define the technical vision, architecture, and multi-year roadmap for WEX's semantic data platform and next generation of Data as a Service.
Build semantic business objects that bring together enterprise data, business context, relationships, metrics, derived attributes, rules, lineage, quality, and governance.
Establish a scalable approach for creating semantic objects across WEX's different lines of business while maintaining consistent enterprise standards.
Lead development of platform capabilities across semantic modeling, ontology, metadata, knowledge graphs, data quality, lineage, data contracts, and governance.
Partner deeply with business and product leaders to capture business meaning that today may live across databases, applications, workflows, documents, spreadsheets, policies, and institutional knowledge.
Enable AI and agentic applications to discover, understand, reason over, and safely act on trusted enterprise data.
Build reusable platform capabilities and developer experiences that allow teams to create new data products and AI experiences faster.
Lead and develop a high-performing organization of engineers, architects, and senior technical leaders.
Partner with Principal and Staff engineers to establish architectural standards and solve complex distributed data and platform problems.
Drive adoption across engineering and business teams, ensuring the platform delivers measurable customer and business outcomes—not simply new technology.