Sr Staff - Data Platform Engineer

About this role

As a
Sr. Staff Data Platform Engineer
,
you will be the primary architect and visionary for the core data infrastructure that powers the entire enterprise. This is a "platform-as-a-product" role; your mission is to build the internal foundation—creating the high-performance engines, abstraction layers, and self-service frameworks that enable hundreds of other engineers to move faster.


You will operate at the
intersection of
Systems Programming and Data Engineering
, solving "hard-tech" problems like automated schema evolution, multi-engine compute optimization, and global data discovery. As a top-level technical individual contributor, you will bridge the gap between long-term business strategy and deep-kernel technical execution, ensuring WEX’s data platform remains a competitive advantage.


Responsibilities

• Architectural Sovereignty: Define the 3-5 year technical roadmap for the Data Lakehouse. You aren't just using tools; you are deciding how storage, compute, and metadata layers (e.g., Apache Polaris, Unity Catalog or Datahub Catalog) interact at an elemental level.
• Platform-as-a-Product: Build internal SDKs, CLI tools, and automated orchestration frameworks. Your goal is to abstract away cloud complexity via Control Planes and Custom Operators, allowing Data Engineers to focus on business logic rather than infrastructure boilerplate.
• Internal R&D: Prototype and benchmark emerging technologies (e.g., specialized Spark extensions, or Rust-based data accelerators) to keep the platform at the bleeding edge of performance and cost-efficiency.
• Global Governance & Security: Architect "compliance-by-design" systems. Automate data lineage, PII masking, and fine-grained access control across petabyte-scale environments using Open Policy Agent (OPA) or similar frameworks without sacrificing developer velocity.
• Engineering Excellence & Influence: Set the gold standard for code quality and system design across the company. You will ...