About the Team & Role

The Director of Kafka and Eventing for PaaS is responsible for leading the strategy, delivery, and operations of enterprise grade eventing and streaming platforms that enable product teams to build scalable, resilient, and secure systems. This role owns Kafka and event driven capabilities as a core part of the Fabric Platform as a Service, ensuring they are reliable, easy to consume, and aligned with business and regulatory requirements.

This leader manages and grows high performing engineering teams while partnering closely with application engineering, SRE, cloud infrastructure, security, and architecture organizations. The role balances hands on technical leadership with people leadership, platform governance, and operational excellence.

Platform and Eventing Leadership

• Leads the design, delivery, and lifecycle management of Kafka and eventing platforms offered as part of the enterprise PaaS.
• Defines platform standards, reference architectures, and golden paths for event driven systems.
• Ensures platforms are scalable, highly available, secure, and cost effective across multiple cloud environments.
• Drives adoption through self service tooling, automation, documentation, and enablement.

Engineering and Technical Direction

• Provides deep technical leadership in distributed systems, event streaming, schema management, connectors, CDC, and streaming security.
• Guides teams in building automation for provisioning, upgrades, certificate and secret management, observability, and compliance.
• Partners with architecture and product teams to evolve platform capabilities based on business needs and usage patterns.

Operations and Reliability

• Owns the operational health of Kafka and eventing services, including availability, performance, incident response, and capacity planning.
• Establishes and tracks SLIs, SLOs, and operational metrics.
• Ensures strong observability, on call readiness, and clear runbooks.
• Drives continuous improvement in reliability, resiliency, and operational maturity.

People and Organizational Leadership

• Manages, mentors, and develops engineering managers and senior engineers.
• Builds an inclusive, high trust team culture focused on ownership, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Sets clear goals, expectations, and career development paths aligned with platform outcomes and organizational priorities.

Cross Functional Partnership

• Works closely with security, risk, compliance, and data teams to ensure eventing platforms meet regulatory, privacy, and audit requirements.
• Partners with product engineering teams to support onboarding, migrations, and best practices for event driven architectures.
• Communicates platform strategy, roadmap, and outcomes to senior leadership.

Experience you'll bring

• Proven experience leading engineering teams responsible for large scale distributed systems or platform services.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka and event streaming ecosystems, including security, operations, and multi tenant platforms.
• Strong understanding of cloud native platforms, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience operating platforms as products with a focus on customer experience, reliability, and adoption.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills with the ability to influence across organizations.

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: $199,300.00 - $246,900.00