WEX Inc. Logo

WEX Inc.

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Posted 13 Days Ago
Be an Early Applicant
In-Office
Chicago, IL, USA
121K-151K Annually
Senior level
In-Office
Chicago, IL, USA
121K-151K Annually
Senior level
Leads large-scale site reliability engineering strategy, architecting highly available and scalable systems, improving observability, automation, incident response, capacity planning, performance, and cloud costs. Builds self-healing mechanisms and AI agents that automate operational workflows, reduce TOIL, and support incident response and anomaly detection. Establishes AI security and governance controls, advises engineering leadership, leads cross-functional reliability initiatives, and mentors engineers developing production-grade SRE and agentic solutions.
The summary above was generated by AI

About the Role

We are looking for a highly motivated, high-potential Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our team as a technical leader and drive transformative impact across WEX’s platform reliability and operational excellence.

This is a particularly exciting time to be part of the SRE function at WEX. Our diverse product ecosystem supports a wide array of customer businesses and generates rich, complex telemetry across applications, infrastructure, and platforms. Ensuring these systems are scalable, observable, and resilient is critical to unlocking business value and customer success.

As a Staff SRE, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the reliability engineering strategy at WEX. You’ll architect and lead efforts that improve availability, performance, and efficiency at scale, driving initiatives across observability, automation, incident management, problem management, capacity planning, and performance optimization. You’ll be hands-on in building foundational tooling and frameworks while also acting as a multiplier, mentoring engineers, aligning cross-functional teams, and influencing platform decisions with a strong reliability lens.

You’ll also help define how WEX applies AI to reliability engineering, building agents and reusable skills that automate high-TOIL work, integrating safely into our AI ecosystem, and establishing security and operational guardrails so intelligent automation is trustworthy, measurable, and scalable. Our team embraces agile development, a strong product mindset, and modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted operations and intelligent automation.
 

You’ll take on some of the most complex, high-impact challenges at WEX, supported by a team of highly skilled engineers and technical leaders invested in your success and growth.

If you’re a senior technical leader passionate about building reliable systems, leading through influence, and making a meaningful impact with AI-enabled operations, this is a fantastic opportunity for you.
 

What You’ll Do
  • Architect and oversee the implementation of mission-critical systems with a focus on availability, scalability, and operational excellence.

  • Define and enforce SRE best practices and operational standards across engineering and platform teams.

  • Lead cross-functional initiatives to enhance system reliability, performance, and efficiency at scale.

  • Serve as a technical advisor for engineering leadership on reliability, architecture, and operational risk.

  • Develop capacity planning and load testing strategies that proactively identify and mitigate scalability risks.

  • Design self-healing and auto-recovery mechanisms that reduce manual intervention during failures.

  • Drive cloud cost optimization and budgeting initiatives without compromising reliability.

  • Design, build, and govern AI agents and reusable skills that automate operational workflows and reduce TOIL.

  • Evaluate and integrate AI ecosystems, including models, agent frameworks, orchestration, tooling interfaces, and evaluation practices, into SRE and platform workflows.

  • Apply AI security and governance controls, including least-privilege tool access, secure data and prompt handling, auditability, and safe automation boundaries.

  • Lead AI-enabled initiatives for incident response, runbook automation, anomaly detection, and capacity/performance insights, with clear measurement of TOIL reduction and reliability outcomes.

  • Mentor engineers on production-grade agentic solutions and help embed AI into day-to-day reliability practices.
     

What You’ll Bring
  • 8+ years of experience with a focus on large-scale system reliability.

  • Expertise in system architecture, cloud platforms, and automation frameworks.

  • Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, service meshes, and distributed tracing.

  • Experience with monitoring and logging platforms (Grafana, ELK stack, Splunk, etc.).

  • Knowledge of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

  • Experience designing high-availability, fault-tolerant architectures.

  • Strong understanding of database reliability engineering (MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL), plus networking, databases, and storage architectures.

  • Excellent incident command and crisis management skills.

  • Hands-on experience building AI agents and skills/tools that integrate with operational systems (APIs, observability, ticketing, CI/CD).

  • Working knowledge of AI ecosystems and agent architectures, including orchestration, tool calling, context/memory, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop patterns.

  • Practical understanding of AI security and governance for production use, secure permissions, data leakage prevention, secrets handling, and guarded autonomous actions.

  • Demonstrated ability to reduce TOIL with AI by automating repetitive operational work and delivering measurable efficiency and reliability gains.
     

Nice to Have

  • Experience with multi-region and multi-cloud deployments.

  • Deep expertise in scalable microservices and event-driven architectures.

  • Strong experience with advanced observability tools (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Prometheus).

  • Leadership in driving large-scale SRE transformations.

  • Experience designing and developing AI agents, skills, and copilots for SRE/platform engineering, including evaluation and safe rollout practices.

  • Familiarity with enterprise agent platforms, skill registries, and observability for AI/agent workflows.

  • Ability to influence engineering culture and process improvements, including adoption of AI-assisted operations under change control, safety, and audit requirements.

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: $120,600.00 - $150,900.00

Similar Jobs

3 Days Ago
Hybrid
172K-300K Annually
Senior level
172K-300K Annually
Senior level
Automotive • Big Data • Information Technology • Robotics • Software • Transportation • Manufacturing
Found and establish GM Vehicle Autonomy’s centralized SRE practice. Build shared reliability tooling, service catalogs, SLOs, error budgets, readiness automation, standards, and production infrastructure. Partner with service owners to assess criticality, dependencies, failure modes, and operational health. Improve incident response, post-incident practices, on-call sustainability, and toil reduction while driving adoption across infrastructure teams. The role requires strong software engineering and distributed-systems expertise across Linux, networking, Kubernetes, cloud, CI/CD, and observability.
Top Skills: C++Ci/CdCloud InfrastructureGoJavaKubernetesLinuxNetworkingObservabilityPolicy-As-CodePython
12 Days Ago
Remote or Hybrid
USA
136K-181K Annually
Entry level
136K-181K Annually
Entry level
Cloud • Security • Software
Design, deploy, and maintain resilient cloud infrastructure for Ping Identity’s mission-critical services. Build and optimize automated CI/CD pipelines, support cloud security and observability, evaluate technologies, participate in planning and on-call rotations, and help improve engineering practices. Collaborate across development and operations teams while sharing expertise and supporting distributed production systems.
Top Skills: Ci/CdCloud PlatformsDistributed SystemsDockerGitGoIdentity And Access ManagementKubernetesNetworking
15 Days Ago
In-Office or Remote
192K-356K Annually
Expert/Leader
192K-356K Annually
Expert/Leader
Cloud • Information Technology • Internet of Things • Professional Services • Software
Leads technical strategy for site reliability, critical incident response, and production resilience across Splunk Cloud. Serves as the escalation authority during P1/P2 events, owns complex enterprise customer environments, guides infrastructure architecture and automation, leads post-mortems and root-cause analysis, improves observability and operational processes, and mentors senior engineers without formal management authority.
Top Skills: AWSGoGoogle Cloud Platform (Gcp)Indexer ClusteringKvstoreLinuxAzurePythonSearch Head ClustersSplSplunkSplunk Observability

What you need to know about the Chicago Tech Scene

With vibrant neighborhoods, great food and more affordable housing than either coast, Chicago might be the most liveable major tech hub. It is the birthplace of modern commodities and futures trading, a national hub for logistics and commerce, and home to the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association. This diverse blend of industry influences has helped Chicago emerge as a major player in verticals like fintech, biotechnology, legal tech, e-commerce and logistics technology. It’s also a major hiring center for tech companies on both coasts.

Key Facts About Chicago Tech

  • Number of Tech Workers: 245,800; 5.2% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
  • Major Tech Employers: McDonald’s, John Deere, Boeing, Morningstar
  • Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fintech, software, logistics technology
  • Funding Landscape: $2.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
  • Notable Investors: Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Arch Venture Partners, MATH Venture Partners, Jump Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners
  • Research Centers and Universities: Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Sign up now Access later

Create Free Account

Please log in or sign up to report this job.

Create Free Account