Director Data Engineering - Data Acquisition

About the Role

WEX is transforming its enterprise data architecture to unlock trusted, scalable, and AI-ready data across all business domains. As part of this journey, we are hiring a Director of Engineering to lead the design, delivery, and governance of our unified ingestion framework—serving as the foundation of our Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform.

This leader will be responsible for building and operating the platform layer that connects hundreds of data sources across internal systems and external partners into WEX’s enterprise data ecosystem. You will lead a talented team of software engineers and collaborate closely with domain-aligned teams to standardize ingestion, streamline onboarding, and scale data operations with governance and observability built in.

What You’ll Do

• Own and scale WEX’s enterprise data ingestion platform, ensuring reliability, reusability, and consistency across domains.

• Lead the unification of disparate ingestion pipelines into a governed, modular framework that accelerates data onboarding and reduces duplication.

• Drive the design and adoption of modern, scalable ingestion patterns—including event-driven, micro-batch, and streaming architectures—by applying strong software engineering principles such as modularity, reusability, and testability across the data acquisition lifecycle.

• Implement DataOps practices including pipeline observability, error handling, lineage tracking, validation, and secure data onboarding.

• Partner with stakeholders across product, engineering, and business teams to identify and prioritize high-value ingestion initiatives.

• Mentor and grow a high-performing team of data engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, scalability, and operational excellence

What You Bring

• 10+ years of experience in scalable software and data engineering practice, with at least 3 years in a leadership or director-level role overseeing platform or ingestion teams in a mid-to-large enterprise.

• Proven track record of designing and scaling data acquisition systems that process high-volume, high-variety data from both internal systems and third-party sources.

• Experience architecting modular, metadata-driven ingestion frameworks capable of supporting hundreds of pipelines across business domains with varying data latencies (batch, micro-batch, streaming).

• Deep understanding of data ingestion patterns at scale, including change data capture (CDC), event-driven pipelines, file-based ingestion , API ingestion, and schema evolution.

• Experience leading teams that manage mission-critical pipelines with strong SLAs for data freshness, reliability, and security.

• Deep understanding of distributed data processing architectures, including orchestration, streaming, and table format abstraction—such as workflow scheduling, event-driven pipelines, and versioned data lakes.

• Demonstrated ability to implement DataOps principles, including observability, lineage, validation, access control, and audit logging.

• Strong cross-functional leadership skills, capable of aligning engineering, data, and business stakeholders around shared outcomes and delivery plans.

• A systems-thinking mindset with a passion for building platforms that are robust, extensible, and designed for reuse at scale.