WEX Inc

Staff Software Engineer (AI & Backend)

WEX Inc$140K — $173K *
US-Anywhere
+ 6 other locationsRemote
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering
  • 8-10 years of professional experience in software engineering
  • Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design
  • Expertise in designing and developing internet-scale services
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills
  • Proficiency in backend development, particularly with Java or C#

Responsibilities

  • Design, develop, and maintain scalable object oriented backend code
  • Develop public REST APIs and internal gRPC APIs
  • Craft and lead system design decisions
  • Write comprehensive automated tests across different levels
  • Analyze systems for performance and stability improvements
  • Implement automation for testing, monitoring, and scaling
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to implement new features

Benefits

  • Health, dental, and vision insurance
  • Retirement savings plan
  • Paid time off
  • Health savings and flexible spending accounts
  • Life and disability insurance
  • Tuition reimbursement
Full Job Description

This is a remote position; however, the candidate must reside within 30 miles of one of the following locations: Boston, MA; San Francisco Bay Area, CA; Dallas, TX; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA; and Portland, ME

How you’ll make an impact:

  • Design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable, and high-performance object oriented code in our backend services.

  • Develop public REST APIs using Java and internal gRPC APIs for inter-service and inter-system communication.

  • Craft systems designs, lead design decisions, and drive alignment with other senior engineers.

  • Write automated unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, concurrency tests, load/performance tests.

  • Analyze existing systems to identify bottlenecks, tech debt, and implement scalability, and stability improvements.

  • Implement automation for testing, monitoring, healing, and scaling applications, continuous integration and deployment to reduce time to market.

  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product managers, designers, and other engineers, to define and implement new features.

  • Conduct code reviews (comment, approve, seek revisions, merge), mentor junior and mid-level engineers, and actively promote engineering best practices.

  • Dive deep and troubleshoot complex issues, devise fixes, author root cause analysis documents, and ensure lasting performance and reliability.

  • Conduct objective and comparative analyses of competing technologies to advise the team of pros and cons of a technology solution.

  • Maintain robust documentation (design docs, run books, change management docs, and readiness plans).

  • Provide live-site support for production applications by monitoring systems, ensuring rapid incident resolution, and driving continuous improvement.

  • Drive cross-team projects as a single-threaded-owner (STO) or tech lead, and actively unblock other engineers to make progress.

Agentic AI & Intelligent Systems :

Design and build agentic AI systems and services, enabling autonomous workflows, reasoning, and task execution within Mobility platforms.

  • Develop AI agents from scratch, including orchestration, tool usage, memory, and multi-step decision-making capabilities.

  • Implement and scale multi-agent architectures to support complex, distributed use cases across payments and fleet ecosystems.

  • Integrate systems using Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar frameworks to enable secure and scalable interaction between AI agents, APIs, and enterprise data sources.

  • Build and optimize LLM-powered services (e.g., OpenAI APIs, LangChain) for production-grade performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.

  • Implement evaluation frameworks, observability, and guardrails to ensure correctness, safety, and compliance of AI-driven systems.

  • Design solutions for context management, memory, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance agent effectiveness.

Experience you'll bring:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering

  • 8-10 years of professional experience in software engineering

  • Strong understanding of data structures and algorithms, object-oriented design, and problem-solving skills

  • Expertise in designing and developing internet-scale services with scalability, availability, security, and reliability design tenets

  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, and a collaborative and empathetic mindset

  • Proficiency in backend development, with expertise in Java or C#, frameworks like SpringBoot, building and optimizing RESTful APIs, ODATA framework, and SQL

Agentic AI & MCP Experience:

  • Hands-on experience building or contributing to AI/LLM-powered applications or agent-based systems

  • Familiarity with agent frameworks, tool-use patterns, and orchestration of LLM workflows

  • Experience integrating AI systems with external tools/APIs using MCP or similar protocols

  • Understanding of prompt engineering, embeddings, and vector-based retrieval systems

  • Experience designing systems for scaling AI workloads in production environments


Preferred Qualifications
  • Master’s degree in computer science or software engineering

  • 10+ years of experience in software engineering

  • Experience with Python, Java, event-driven architecture and tools like Kafka

  • Experience working on card payments

  • Familiarity with cloud-native architecture (containerization using tools such as Docker and Kubernetes)

  • Awareness of API security and PCI DSS compliance requirements

  • Ability to work on existing codebase, contribute improvements, and adapt to legacy systems’ constraints

Nice to Have (AI Focus):

  • Experience building AI skills & deploying AI solutions to production environments

  • Experience building production-grade AI agents or copilots, Cursor AI

  • Familiarity with multi-agent systems and distributed AI architectures

  • Experience with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, OpenSearch, Milvus)

  • Knowledge of AI evaluation techniques, safety practices, and responsible AI principles

The base pay range represents the anticipated low and high end of the pay range for this position. Actual pay rates will vary and will be based on various factors, such as your qualifications, skills, competencies, and proficiency for the role. Base pay is one component of WEX's total compensation package. Most sales positions are eligible for commission under the terms of an applicable plan. Non-sales roles are typically eligible for a quarterly or annual bonus based on their role and applicable plan. WEX's comprehensive and market competitive benefits are designed to support your personal and professional well-being. Benefits include 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. For more information, check out the "About Us" section.

Pay Range: $140,600.00 - $173,100.00

About WEX Inc

WEX Inc is a provider of corporate payment solutions. The company operates in three segments: Fleet Solutions, Travel and Corporate Solutions, and Health and Employee Benefit Solutions. The Fleet Solutions segment provides payment and transaction processing services to commercial and government fleets. The Travel and Corporate Solutions segment focuses on providing payment solutions to businesses that have employees who travel for work. The Health and Employee Benefit Solutions segment provides healthcare payment products and software, as well as payroll and HR solutions.
Learn more about WEX Inc
Size
5,600 employees
Market Cap
$6.9 billion
Industry
Net Income
-$243.6 million
Founded
1983
5 Year Trend
+12.8%
Revenue
$1.5 billion
NASDAQ

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