Staff Software Engineer – Data Acquisition
About The Position
The Data Acquisition Team is the entry point to WEX’s Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform, ingesting, validating, and orchestrating raw data from internal systems and third-party providers. The Staff Software Engineer owns the technical direction and delivery of core data acquisition platform capabilities while remaining hands-on. The role leads architecture decisions, develops reusable ingestion services, and guides engineers across teams. The work supports batch, change data capture (CDC), and event-driven ingestion, with expectations for data quality, reliability, security, and cost. The role contributes to WEX’s data platform transformation by building a foundation for analytics, automation, and product intelligence across business domains. During the first year, the engineer will work with engineering and product leadership to establish baselines and agree on outcomes, including faster onboarding through reusable connectors and configuration-driven patterns, wider adoption of reusable ingestion capabilities, reliable completeness and freshness, and improved deployment quality through automated testing and actionable observability.
Requirements
- B.Sc. in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including delivery of production distributed systems or data platforms and demonstrated technical leadership across team boundaries.
- Strong programming skills in Python, Java, Scala, or another systems-focused language.
- Experience with data integration and ingestion pipelines, including bringing data in from source systems, transforming it, and delivering it reliably downstream.
- Solid grasp of engineering fundamentals, including version control, modular design, testing, and performance tuning.
- Demonstrated experience designing and operating production integrations that handle schema evolution, failure recovery, observability, and secure access.
- Ability to lead architecture decisions, explain engineering tradeoffs, resolve dependencies across teams, and guide implementation through production adoption.
- Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools for design, coding, testing, or documentation, with validation of generated outputs for correctness, security, and maintainability.
- Collaborative mindset and comfort working across domains, products, and infrastructure layers.
- Strong sense of ownership and accountability.
Nice To Haves
- M.Sc. in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Experience building reusable connectors, metadata-driven ingestion services, or configuration-driven onboarding capabilities.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain high-performance data acquisition pipelines integrating systems across WEX and third-party vendors.
- Lead design and delivery of a modular ingestion platform with reusable connectors and configuration-driven onboarding.
- Establish metadata and configuration patterns that reduce source-specific development and support Data Acquisition as a Service.
- Build schema validation, completeness checks, reconciliation, duplicate prevention, and audit logging into shared ingestion components.
- Support safe retries, replay, backfills, and schema evolution so failures can be recovered without losing or incorrectly duplicating data.
- Design batch, CDC, and streaming ingestion patterns that meet agreed freshness, throughput, and recovery requirements.
- Evaluate performance, source-system impact, and operating cost when selecting and extending ingestion technologies.
- Ensure traceability, lineage, and security through integration with control plane and governance systems.
- Lead design and code reviews, maintain technical specifications and architectural decisions, and mentor engineers in reusable platform design.
- Establish automated testing and CI/CD practices for ingestion code, connector configuration, and infrastructure, with validation before production deployment.
- Partner with the established production support process on complex escalations, root-cause analysis, and preventive engineering improvements.
- Work with engineering and product leadership to establish first-year baselines and outcomes.
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, based on role and applicable plan
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
