Rising Stars 2025: Aymel Sanchez

Aymel Sanchez, 36
Director, enterprise architecture
Genesee & Wyoming Railroad Services Inc.

Nominator’s quote: “Aymel is not only a top-notch IT technology professional but deeply rooted in G&W’s business. He has developed a strong partnership with business leaders across the company, led a high-performance IT team, and is considered a thought leader and innovator by both C-suite leaders and field employees alike.” — Michael Miller, Genesee & Wyoming Inc.

Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer information systems, Baruch College.

Job responsibilities: Manage development disciplines, including application development, systems integration and data warehousing. Currently exploring AI opportunities to unlock more value for the organization. Collaborate with business partners, identify problems and determine how technology can solve those problems.

Describe your career path.
After college, I joined G&W as a business systems analyst supporting the enterprise resources system (ERP). I moved to the enterprise architecture team, starting as a systems architect, supporting the data warehouse and small web-based tools for an internal line of businesses. I was promoted to manager of enterprise architecture, and later, to director of enterprise architecture.

What sparked your interest in the rail industry?
To be honest, I never set out to join the rail industry after graduating from college. My interest was within the financial industry based on my exposure in college, but G&W gave me an opportunity, and I seized it. After being with G&W for over 12 years, I’ve realized that the industry is ripe for technological innovation. So, it’s a more attractive space to me personally as a problem-solver instead of in other industries that may be more mature and set in their ways, which makes it harder to innovate within.

What was your first job and what did you learn from it?
As a business systems analyst, I was primarily tasked with supporting the ERP system and a few other satellite systems that would integrate with the ERP. This first job really helped me hone my very nascent tech skills to be able to troubleshoot month-end accounting period issues, as well as address bottlenecks via new tools I built. It served as a “this is the real world” realization. While in this job, my lens of the business was very focused on finance and accounting, which is typically the domain where a business process terminates, as I would later learn. It gave me a pivot point to then learn how other business domains interlock with each other to put all the puzzle pieces together, at which point one can really analyze where the bottlenecks exist and optimizations can be made to drive a positive impact.

What is something people might be surprised to learn about you?
When I was in high school, for a very short period of time, I convinced myself that I wanted to be an actor after watching a slew of Tom Cruise movies. My parents entertained my “out of nowhere” new passion by paying for acting school and a headshot photo, which was not cheap! After attending a few sessions, I quickly realized I was not as good as I thought at acting. I had to break it to my parents that I had made an egregious mistake, and I was very sorry for wasting their money.

What is a valuable lesson that you’ve learned so far in your career?
It takes a driven and well-connected team to accomplish anything of substance and impact. A single, very capable person can get far alone, but eventually they will run into walls that will necessitate coordinating with others to overcome. A quote I operate by is, “You can go fast and alone, or you can slow a bit down and go further together.”

How do you stay motivated and resilient when things get tough at work or in life?
I return to the basics and try not to let the overall problem overwhelm me. What can I control? What can I influence to make a positive impact? I start to break down the situation into controllables and focus my energy on those angles. As I start seeing results, if positive, I move on to the next aspect. If negative, I rethink the approach and do it over again. The key is to stay optimistic that you’ve been here before even if it’s not the exact same situation. Be confident in your abilities and your team’s ability to solve problems.

If you could share a meal with anyone in the world today, who would it be and what would you want to talk about?
While in college, I worked part time at the American Museum of Natural History, where I was assigned to the Hayden Planetarium exhibit. Naturally, that makes Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is the planetarium’s director, one of my top bucket-list people to sit down for dinner with and talk about black holes, the four forces of the universe and relativity.

What do you believe is the rail industry’s greatest challenge today?
Becoming more transparent and technologically engaged to end customers. In the day and age when we’re more connected via technology, and customers expect real-time or near real-time visibility into services they pay for, the rail industry needs to do better to meet those expectations. Individual carriers need to work better together to share data and integrate more efficiently for the benefit of the end customer.