Principal AI/ML Engineer

Responsibilities

• Lead and drive the development of technology and platform for the company's AI/ML engineering needs, ensuring the functional richness, reliability, performance, and flexibility of this platform.

• 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 for better technical solutions to effectively serve all needs in the broad risk area of Wex.

• Guide your team to leverage data and/or AI technology or tools in your design and development for high productivity and better solution quality. Show strong thought leadership and influence your peers in this area.

• Closely partner with other senior engineers across the organizations at Wex to deeply understand business needs and jointly come up with technical solutions to serve these needs effectively.

• 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 performed 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 term and long term.

• Set a high bar, and provide technical guidance and effective training & mentorship to the engineering teams in your group, including engineering principles, skills, and best practices.

• 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 team on highly complex situations that impact our organization and then lead teams through the initiative, driving excellent quality results and achieving defined OKRs across the organization.

• Provide strategic thought leadership on business initiatives using your deep technical and business industry expertise.

Qualifications & Experience

• A technically deep and innovative Software Engineer leader able to act and deliver to the business needs.

• Have 15-20 years of software design and development experience at a large scale.

• Strong software development skills in chosen programming language, but ready and willing to learn and program in Java and Python.

• Good experience in building machine learning supervised and unsupervised models. Experience in Reinforcement Learning is a plus.

• Experience in using LLM models is a plus.

• Broad understanding of distributed computing frameworks like Ray and Spark.

• Demonstrable experience in Kubernetes and Terraform.

• Experience with Sagemaker is a plus.

• Broad understanding of cloud architecture tools and services, such as S3, EMR, Kubernetes, and Lambda functions. Experience in AWS and Azure is highly desirable.

• Deep technically; hands-on in architecture design, development, deployment, and production operation; familiar with agile software development and modern development tools and frameworks.

• Rich experience and deep expertise in the areas of Big Data and large scale data platforms, especially in AI and ML.

• Highly experienced and deep understanding of CI/CD automation.

• Rich experience in combined engineering practice and agile development. Experienced in leading and guiding teams for effective development using this approach.

• Excellent analytical skills; capability in identifying and resolving complex problems.

• An understanding of and experience in