Senior Staff Engineer, Risk

Company Overview

WEX is a global commerce platform and payments technology company that helps businesses solve operational complexities such as employee benefits, fleet management and mobilization, and streamlining payments. Our goal is to simplify the business of running a business for our customers, freeing them to spend more time, with less worry, on the things they love. We are on a journey to build a unified, world-class user experience across our products and services, leveraging customer-driven innovations across all our strategic initiatives, including big data, AI, and Risk.

Position Summary

We are looking for a highly motivated, technically deep, and experienced hands-on Software Engineer to join a group of high-performing engineers in the Risk area to provide hands-on technical leadership including tech direction, tech stack decisioning, architecture design, end-to-end development, deployment, and production measurement and monitoring.

This is an exciting time to be in risk technology at WEX. We are hiring for a cross-functional initiative with the goal of creating a modern, cloud-based technology ecosystem that will enable WEX to be more nimble, faster to market, and open to emerging business opportunities, while keeping regulations, policy, and risk mitigation top of mind. We are in the process of building a powerful platform for risk operations and management, credit underwriting and management, and finance risk operations and management, all built on top of our Data Platform and AI Platform, leveraging open-source technologies as well as vendor platforms and tools.

The vision of this integrated risk platform is to streamline how WEX interacts with customers-ranging from creating accounts, maintaining and expanding relationships to monitoring for overall health and risk across multiple vectors. With strong risk control and management, this platform will enable WEX to grow our business and customer base at a faster pace, and in a safer manner, all while improving customer experience.

This role will report to the Senior Director of Risk Engineering, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It can also be based in Chicago, Portland, Maine (Wex HQ), or Boston. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in the risk field and risk platform development, a proven background in developing complex software platforms, strong engineering skills and technical expertise, excellent communication skills, and a drive to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. This individual will have a strong track record of delivering an effective, highly available, and flexible technology platform in a hyper-growth environment where priorities shift quickly.

Responsibilities

• From the technology and engineering side, lead and drive the development of the technology and platform for the company's risk needs, ensuring the functional richness, reliability, performance, and flexibility of the Risk Platform.

• Own the technology and architecture of the Risk platform and services by partnering with the Senior Director of Risk Engineering and other leaders in the team.

• Challenge the status quo and maintain a high bar to drive better technical solutions that effectively serve the broad risk needs of WEX.

• Closely partner with leaders in the Risk Product and Risk & Compliance organizations to deeply understand business needs and collaboratively develop technical solutions to meet these needs effectively. Demonstrate strong thought leadership and partnership.

• Help grow and build a strong global risk engineering team, attracting high talent and hiring with a high bar. Provide effective guidance and coaching on engineering principles and best practices to ensure team productivity, high quality, and timeliness in initiative development and delivery. Ensure reliable risk platform production execution with observability, and provide clear visibility to partners.

• Partner with leaders in the Data, AI, and Risk organizations to leverage the Data Platform and AI Platform to address the needs of Risk.

• Partner with the solutions architecture and line-of-business (LOB) product and engineering organizations on integrating the Risk Platform with their products and systems, ensuring reliable and high-performance execution.

• Drive the technical vision and strategy for Risk, serving both near-term and long-term business needs, by partnering with the Senior Director of Risk Engineering. Close collaboration with the Risk & Compliance and Risk Product teams is essential.

• Set a high bar and provide technical guidance, training, and mentorship to engineering teams, including engineering principles, skills, and best practices. Uphold strong DORA metrics across the organization. Foster an environment of continuous learning and innovation. Build an inclusive, productive, innovative, and engaging Risk group, attracting top talent from the industry. Guide leaders within your group to do the same.

• Partner with the security and SRE organizations to ensure continuous improvement and the fulfillment of security requirements, SLOs, and error budgets.

Qualifications & Experience

• A technically deep, innovative, empathetic, and passionate technical leader, capable of acting and delivering on business needs.

• 10+ years of software design and development experience at a large scale.

• Technically deep and hands-on in architecture design, development, deployment, and production operations; familiar with agile software development and modern development tools and frameworks; holding strong engineering principles, including automation, code quality, and best practices, with a high bar. Extensive experience in the full software development life cycle (E2E), including production monitoring.

• Extensive experience in the risk area, including architecting and developing Risk platforms.

• Strong understanding and experience in Data and ML/AI, and applying these to solve risk-related problems.

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

• Excellent leadership and partnership skills, with the ability to navigate a matrixed organization and influence technical direction and strategy.

• Exceptional analytical skills, with the ability to identify and resolve complex problems.

• Understanding of and experience in payments is a plus.

• Ability to drive action and make clear decisions, leveraging analytics and a test-and-learn approach. Capable of recognizing and recovering quickly from failures, both as an individual and on behalf of the team.

• A mentor to individual contributors of varying seniority levels and expertise.

• Ability to encourage and foster a culture of visibility and transparency across teams.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

• A strong philosophy of continuous improvement.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field; a higher degree (Master's or PhD) in a related field is a plus.

Leadership & Personal Characteristics

Beyond experience, the right leadership competencies and personal style are critical to success as Senior Staff Engineer. The candidate will model WEX's commitment to innovation, integrity, execution, relationships, community, and the excellence that they commit to their customers. They will have a strong corporate stewardship philosophy and leadership style combined with the following:

• Demonstrates a collaborative, engaging, mission-driven style with good listening skills combined with gravitas and self-confidence in order to effectively interact with senior leadership and other key constituencies with humility, empathy, transparency, cultural sensitivity, and agility.

• Champions a culture of high standards, pushes for progress, embraces change and challenges the status quo based on integrity, strong partnership and financial responsibility. Possesses uncompromising ethics and unwavering integrity.

• Able to operate in a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment with a hands-on approach.

• Leads with empathy. Recognizes others, listens intently, holds others accountable, and makes diversity and inclusion a priority. Promotes a culture of trust, transparency, fairness, innovation, collaboration, inclusion, and diversity of thought; empowers individuals.

• Communicates effectively in small and large group formats. Able to articulate a compelling vision and purpose that excites the team and drives outstanding performance and service delivery excellence.

• Talent magnet, talent developer and talent scout that proactively engages external talent and builds and nurtures internal talent; empowers individuals and manages diverse teams to drive engagement and performance.

• Possesses a high level of intellectual curiosity and learning agility. A natural change agent with a combination of vision and execution skills.

• Understands nuance and how to drive change through influence across a complex business. Superb stakeholder management and comfortable operating in a fast-changing environment.