Lead Software Engineer (AI & Data Platforms)

Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

At Visa, you'll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world. Join Visa and do work that matters — to you, to your community, and to the world.

Progress starts with you.

Job Description

Visa’s Technology Organization is a community of problem solvers and innovators reshaping the future of commerce. We operate the world’s most sophisticated processing networks capable of handling more than 65k secure transactions a second across 80M merchants, 15k Financial Institutions, and billions of everyday people. While working with us you’ll get to work on complex distributed systems and solve massive scale problems centered on new payment flows, business and data solutions, cyber security, and B2C platforms.

The Opportunity:

We are looking for Versatile, curious, and energetic Sr. Staff Software Engineers who embrace solving complex challenges on a global scale. As a Visa Sr. Staff Software Engineer, you will be an integral part of a multi-functional development team inventing, designing, building, and testing software products that reach a truly global customer base. While building components of powerful payment technology, you will get to see your efforts shaping the digital future of monetary transactions.

The Work itself:

• Design code and systems that touch 40% of the world population while influencing Visa’s internal standards for scalability, security, and reusability
• Collaborate multi-functionally to create design artifacts and develop best-in-class software solutions for multiple Visa technical offerings
• Actively contribute to product quality improvements, valuable service technology, and new business flows in diverse agile squads
• Develop robust and scalable products intended for a myriad of customers including end-user merchants, b2b, and business to government solutions.
• Leverage innovative technologies to build the next generation of Payment Services, Transaction Platforms, Real-Time Payments, and Buy Now Pay Later Technology
• Opportunities to make a difference on a global or local scale through mentorship and continued learning opportunities

Essential Functions:

• Provides strategic technical and functional knowledge of the e-commerce platform as well as a thorough understanding of the business to direct strategy on collecting and understanding requirements.
• Leads meetings with product partners to recommend development and solution strategies that improve the design and functionality of interface features across a range of payment products.
• Formalizes Standard Processes on the use of programming languages (e.g. HTML, C++, Java) to write code that fulfills website modification requests and technical requirements.
• Leads and plans the piloting and integration of new technology capabilities and features that enhance the user website experience across e-commerce products.
• Analyzes patterns across bugs and implements systemic solutions to ensure websites remain functional and easy to use.
• Design data platforms that operate on petabyte-scale transactional data
• Lead architecture for data marts, cubes, lakehouse, and AI data pipeline
• Enable agentic AI, Text-to-SQL, RAG, and ML system
• Influence cross-org data strategy and governance
• Mentor senior engineers and define best practices

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in the office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• 10 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 8 years of work experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters/ MBA/JD/MD) or at least 3 years of work experience with a PhD

Preferred Qualifications:

• 12 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or 8-10 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 6+ years of work experience with a PhD
• Proficiency in SQL and experience with other programming languages such as Python, Java, or Scala.
• 3+ Experience with big data tools and frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, or Hive.
• 3+ Strong experience in ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools and processes.
• 5+ Familiarity with databases and data warehousing solutions, both relational (like MySQL, Oracle) and non-relational (like MongoDB, Cassandra).
• 1+ years of experience in GenAI.
• Strong Knowledge of data modeling and data architecture.
• Experience supporting GenAI and LLM-based systems — including building and maintaining data pipelines for model training, fine-tuning, or RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) workflows. Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings pipelines, and prompt retrieval systems is a strong advantage.
• Familiarity with Agentic AI architectures — understanding of multi-agent systems, agent orchestration, and designing data workflows that support autonomous decision-making processes is highly desirable.
• Ability to collaborate with data scientists, ML engineers, and GenAI platform teams to productionize AI applications, ensure data integrity, and support model observability and performance monitoring.
• Experience in automation and setup scheduling jobs on Hadoop like Apache Tuber or other tools
• Experience with kafka or flink steaming data to hadoop is a plus
• Experience with cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure is plus
• Experience with data visualization tools and BI tools like Tableau, Power BI etc. can be a plus.

The Skills You Bring:

• Energy and Experience: A growth mindset that is curious and passionate about technologies and enjoys challenging projects on a global scale
• Challenge the Status Quo: Comfort in pushing the boundaries, ‘hacking’ beyond traditional solutions
• Language Expertise: Expertise in one or more general development languages (e.g., Java, C#, C++)
• Builder: Experience building and deploying modern services and web applications with quality and scalability
• Learner: Constant drive to learn new technologies such as Angular, React, Kubernetes, Docker, etc.
• Partnership: Experience collaborating with Product, Test, Dev-ops, and Agile/Scrum teams
• We do not expect that any single candidate would fulfill all of these characteristics. For instance, we have exciting team members who are really focused on building scalable systems but didn’t work with payments technology or web applications before joining Visa.

Additional Information

Work Hours: Varies upon the needs of the department.

Travel Requirements: This position requires travel 5-10% of the time.

Mental/Physical Requirements: This position will be performed in an office setting. The position will require the incumbent to sit and stand at a desk, communicate in person and by telephone, frequently operate standard office equipment, such as telephones and computers.

Visa is an EEO Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.

Visa will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable local law, including the requirements of Article 49 of the San Francisco Police Code.

U.S. APPLICANTS ONLY: The estimated salary range for this position is 173,100.00 to 276,800.00 USD per year, which may include potential sales incentive payments (if applicable). Salary may vary depending on job-related factors which may include knowledge, skills, experience, and location. In addition, this position may be eligible for bonus and equity. Visa has a comprehensive benefits package for which this position may be eligible that includes Medical, Dental, Vision, 401 (k), FSA/HSA, Life Insurance, Paid Time Off, and Wellness Program.