About the Team/Role
You'll lead a dynamic engineering team in our modern payments platform, currently powering corporate payments with plans to expand across all lines of business. Your team builds on an event-driven, microservices architecture in Kubernetes, using Terraform, Kafka, and CI/CD to enable true continuous delivery. You embrace AI-assisted engineering to improve quality, speed, and developer experience, and you guide teams to use these tools responsibly and securely.
As a servant leader who earns trust through technical credibility and genuine investment in your team's growth, you'll set clear technical direction, stay hands-on with the code, and foster an accountable, growth-oriented culture.
You'll tackle complex engineering challenges at scale, processing millions of transactions daily on a cloud-native platform that meets aggressive uptime SLAs. In partnership with Product, you'll align on outcomes and use delivery and reliability metrics to reduce friction and invest in resilient, observable systems. Your work directly impacts WEX's ability to process payments reliably and securely at scale, with opportunities to shape the future architecture of our payments ecosystem.
Who This Role Is ForThis role demands genuine strength across both technical delivery and people leadership.
You'll write production code, lead architectural decisions, AND build high-performing teams. If you've moved away from hands-on engineering or prefer to delegate technical decisions entirely, this isn't the right fit. Similarly, if people leadership feels like overhead rather than core to your impact, you'll struggle here.
We're looking for someone who:
Gets energy from both solving hard technical problems AND watching their people grow
Can mass context-switch between a gnarly production issue and a difficult 1:1 conversation
Sees code review as a mentoring opportunity, not a bottleneck to clear
Believes the best technical decisions come from empowered teams, not top-down mandates
Technical Leadership
Spend meaningful time hands-on each week - writing production code, pairing on complex problems, and leading design sessions
Be the person your team comes to for hard technical calls - you don't defer every decision to a tech lead
Own architectural direction and technical roadmap for your team's services
Model engineering excellence through deep, constructive code reviews that teach as well as critique
Champion responsible, secure adoption of AI tools across the SDLC to accelerate delivery and improve quality
People Leadership
Lead with a servant leadership style - you're there to remove obstacles, provide context, and help your team succeed, not to direct every decision
Build a safe, accountable culture where high standards and psychological safety coexist
Mentor and grow engineers through regular 1:1s, actionable feedback, and deliberate stretch opportunities
Enable autonomy by clarifying intent and guardrails, then trusting your team to make decisions
Have the hard conversations when needed - performance, behaviour, career pivots — with directness and empathy
Delivery & Operations
Deliver reliably, using meaningful metrics like lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR to drive improvement
Remove friction by unblocking work, reducing tech debt, and streamlining processes to maintain flow
Own complex technical, delivery, and operational problems end to end
Promote resilient architecture and operational excellence across services
Represent the team with stakeholders to reduce churn, align priorities, and amplify impact
These aren't "nice to haves" — we assess all of them equally:
You can write, debug, and review production C#/.NET code today — not five years ago
You've built and led teams where people grew, stayed, and delivered — you can talk about specific individuals and how you helped them develop
You've owned architectural decisions for distributed systems and can defend them at a whiteboard, including the trade-offs you made
You've shipped software using CI/CD, IaC, and modern DevOps practices — not just approved others doing it
You actively use AI-assisted development tools and can coach others to get real value from them without overreliance
2+ years leading software engineering teams
10+ years of software development experience
Track record of building positive team cultures that balance high expectations with support and growth
Deep expertise in modern software engineering practices, cloud platforms, and DevOps approaches including test and deployment automation
Strong understanding of microservice architectures, distributed systems, and building data-intensive applications at scale
Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills
Experience with financial or payment systems (preferred)
You'll work with (and should have experience in most of):
.NET/C# and TypeScript
Cloud-native development: Kubernetes, Terraform, Terragrunt, containerisation
Event streaming with Kafka
Modern frontend technologies (Angular)
CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code
Database technologies and data management practices
AI-assisted developer tools and LLM-based services
We assess technical capability and leadership equally — strength in one doesn't compensate for weakness in the other.
Technical assessment: You'll complete a hands-on coding exercise and walk us through system design decisions you've made, including trade-offs and what you'd do differently
Leadership scenarios: We'll discuss real situations from your experience — how you've grown people, handled performance issues, navigated conflict, and built culture
Values alignment: We'll explore how you think about servant leadership, autonomy, and building inclusive teams
Scope that matters — your team's work directly impacts payment processing at scale
Autonomy to shape your team's engineering practices and culture
The opportunity to stay genuinely hands-on while growing your impact through mentoring, hiring, and platform-wide influence
An inclusive, high-expectations environment where craft is valued
Access to the latest tech and AI tooling
