Role Description This is a remote position; however, the candidate must reside within 30 miles of one of the following locations: Portland, ME; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; San Francisco Bay Area, CA; and Seattle/WA. As WEX continues to scale its Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform, the Data Acquisition Team plays a critical role in enabling secure, scalable, and reliable ingestion of data from hundreds of internal systems and external sources. We are seeking a hands-on Senior Manager, Software Engineering - Data Acquisition to lead our team in acquiring and processing high-volume data, while simultaneously driving the evolution toward AI-augmented, spec-driven software development to enhance platform scalability and delivery speed. This role requires a strong leader with deep technical expertise in data pipelines, distributed systems, and cloud architecture, who can drive technical excellence, foster a culture of innovation, and align the data acquisition strategy with overall business goals. Responsibilities - Engineering Leadership & Team Development: - Recruit, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of software engineers focused on data acquisition. - Foster a collaborative and inclusive culture. - Oversee performance management, career pathing, and top-tier talent acquisition. - AI-Augmented Development Strategy: - Pioneer the adoption of AI-assisted software development across engineering teams. - Define metrics and implement AI-enabled development workflows to enhance engineering productivity. - Specification-Driven Development (SDD): - Establish and enforce a specification-first development methodology. - Standardize templates for all key artifacts (APIs, data contracts, ingestion pipelines, architecture). - Ensure end-to-end traceability across implementation, validation, deployment, and observability. - Architectural Transformation & Modernization: - Drive the migration to automated, metadata-driven, and declarative engineering architectures. - Develop reusable frameworks that translate technical specifications directly into generated code, deployment artifacts, and operational controls. - Strategic Roadmap Execution: - Define and execute the technical roadmap for all data acquisition pipelines and systems. - Ensure the infrastructure is highly scalable, reliable, secure, and cost-effective to accommodate accelerating data volume and velocity. - Technical Governance & Oversight: - Provide authoritative technical direction on the design, development, and maintenance of mission-critical data ingestion frameworks. - Mandate and enforce best practices for software engineering, data governance, and data quality. - Stakeholder Collaboration: - Partner closely with Product Management, Data Science, Data Governance, and other engineering teams. - Align data solutions with overarching business requirements and strategic data needs. - Engineering Process Optimization: - Institute and champion continuous improvement in engineering processes, tools, and methodologies. - Include CI/CD, automation, monitoring, and alerting practices. - Sustained Operational Excellence: - Guarantee the high availability and performance of all data acquisition systems. - Take ownership of incident response, recovery, and thorough root cause analysis for major service disruptions. - Resource & Financial Stewardship: - Oversee budget allocation, resource management, and capacity planning. - Ensure the strategic growth of the data acquisition organization. Qualifications - Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. - Experience: 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5+ years in a management role overseeing software engineering or data acquisition teams. - Experience in leading virtual teams is highly desirable. - Technical Expertise: - Experience implementing AI-assisted engineering workflows in production software organizations. - Deep understanding of specification-driven engineering, declarative system design, or model-driven development. - Deep expertise in building and managing high-volume, real-time and batch data pipelines (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, Pulsar). - Proficiency with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and experience designing scalable, serverless, or containerized data ingestion architectures (e.g., Kubernetes, EKS/AKS/GKE). - Strong knowledge of various data sources, integration patterns (APIs, web scraping, messaging queues), and ETL/ELT tools. - Expertise in programming languages such as Java, Python, Scala, or Go. - Solid understanding of database technologies (SQL, NoSQL, Data Warehouses like Snowflake, Redshift, etc.). - Leadership Skills: Proven ability to lead, motivate, and manage multiple distributed teams. Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills. - Problem Solving: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to define solutions for complex technical challenges. Benefits - Health, dental and vision insurances. - Retirement savings plan. - Paid time off. - Health savings account. - Flexible spending accounts. - Life insurance. - Disability insurance. - Tuition reimbursement. - And more. Pay Range $175,600.00 - $204,300.00