Sr Director, Payments SRE

About the role

Senior Director, Payments SRE

About the Team/Role
We are seeking a highly motivated and visionary senior technical leader to join WEX as Senior Director, Payments SRE, driving transformational change and delivering significant business impact across WEX's payments platform ecosystem.
This is an exciting moment to join the Site Reliability Engineering organization at WEX. Our sophisticated payments platforms process high-volume, low-latency transactions for a broad spectrum of customer businesses and generate vast, complex telemetry and operational data. Reliability, scalability, and efficiency are mission-critical — they protect transactional integrity, safeguard customer trust, and unlock the full potential of our services at scale.
In this role, you'll be at the forefront of defining and executing WEX's reliability engineering vision. You'll lead complex, cross-functional initiatives that elevate our observability, incident and problem management, automation, performance optimization, and capacity planning capabilities. You'll architect resilient systems, design proactive reliability strategies, and build the frameworks and tooling that power operational excellence across the company.
Beyond technical leadership, you'll serve as a strategic thought partner to engineering, product, and platform leadership — setting direction, influencing architecture, and embedding SRE principles across the development lifecycle. You'll mentor engineers and engineering leaders across levels, scale best practices, and act as a catalyst for a culture of reliability, continuous improvement, and innovation. We work with modern technologies and leverage AI and automation to drive smarter operations within an agile, product-centric engineering model.
If you're a visionary technical leader passionate about building reliable, scalable payment systems — and you're excited to make a lasting impact while growing your career — this is a rare and powerful opportunity.
How you'll make an impact:

• Set the vision and org-level strategy for SRE across reliability, observability, automation, and incident management.
• Shape and scale the SRE function across multiple payments domains, leading other SRE managers and senior individual contributors.
• Lead the development of innovative solutions to complex reliability challenges in high-availability, low-latency payment systems.
• Drive cultural transformation that prioritizes reliability, operational excellence, and a blameless, continuous-improvement mindset.
• Ensure business continuity, disaster recovery, and compliance across the payments platform.
• Build and maintain relationships with executive stakeholders, representing the SRE organization in exec-level forums, reviews, and strategic planning sessions.
• Represent WEX in industry forums and conferences as a thought leader in reliability engineering.
• Drive hiring strategy, headcount planning, and long-term team capability growth.

Experience you'll bring:

• 15 years of experience in software engineering with 7 years of engineering management experience managing managers and ICs.
• Deep experience in cloud-native architecture and large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in system design, automation, and performance optimization.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, service meshes, and distributed tracing.
• Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with monitoring and logging platforms (Grafana, ELK stack, Splunk, or similar).
• Strong understanding of database reliability engineering (MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL) and of networking and storage architectures.
• Proven experience with high-availability, low-latency systems and workloads requiring transactional integrity and consistency.
• Excellent incident command and crisis management skills.
• Strong experience with regulatory and compliance frameworks.
• Exceptional leadership skills with a proven track record of driving reliability improvements.
• Skilled at managing distributed teams and fostering psychological safety in high-stakes environments.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Understanding of PCI-DSS compliance and secure handling of payment data.
• Experience with real-time monitoring of payment flows and exceptions, partner/payment-gateway integrations, and failure recovery and idempotency in financial transactions.
• Familiarity with end-of-day reconciliation and cutoff schedules.
• Deep expertise in AI/ML for anomaly detection and predictive analytics in observability, and a track record of applying AI to solve significant Site Reliability and Operations problems.

• Strong financial acumen in cost optimization and cloud-spend strategies.
• Proven ability to align SRE practices with business goals and influence C-level executives on reliability strategy.
• Track record of building and leading SRE organizations across multiple domains or product lines.
• Ability to define and institutionalize reliability practices — standardized SLOs, blameless culture, and incident communications.
• Strong organizational and stakeholder-management skills across Engineering, Product, and Executive teams.
• Recognized thought leader with publications or conference talks in SRE.