Cybersecurity Engineer
Visa is hiring a Cybersecurity Engineer in Foster City, United States. It pays $137k-$213k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Visa.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this cybersecurity role Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Claude, Mistral and LangChain.
- Level classifies it as a senior role.
- Level lists 848 other open roles at Visa.
AI in this role
Cybersecurity Engineer focusing on application security, threat modeling, and security reviews including AI agent applications.
About Us
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
Overview:
Cybersecurity is at the heart of our culture. Our diligence and expertise are what makes us the undisputed leader in electronic payments. We’ve made it our priority to create a top-tier Security Architecture team, poised to defend us against any potential cyber threats. We’re looking for those of you who are inherently driven and fascinated by the art and science of cyber defense.
As a leader in global payments, Visa faces unique and complex cybersecurity challenges. The rapid pace of technological advancement necessitates a forward-looking approach to cybersecurity that goes beyond traditional methods. Maintaining our leadership position in cybersecurity requires continuous researching and prototyping new security technologies. As Cybersecurity Engineer and Security Architect, you’ll work with a group of enterprise and application security architects, along with security researchers to lead the advanced prototyping to accelerate time-to-market of new and exciting cybersecurity research and innovative ideas and proposals.
We’ll arm you with the very best tools and tech so that you can deliver top notch results. Development underpins job fulfilment at Visa. As Cybersecurity Engineer, you’ll be enthused by getting stuck on various defense and security related projects, as well as the chance to work with people from a range of disciplines, as well as colleagues and clients at every level.
So, what do we expect from your day to day:
Essential Functions:
- Be a product security champion by driving Security Architecture and Design/implementation/optimization for Web, API and Mobile, AI Agent applications across Visa.
- Engage in the initial requirements definition including analysis of threats and risks and alignment with Visa security, Engineering, IT and Architecture standards.
- Conduct and facilitate security reviews, threat modelling including deep design reviews throughout the development lifecycle.
- Facilitate "table-top"/red-team/scenario analysis exercises in conjunction with other SME's, and plan the resolution of any identified vulnerabilities/issues
- Develop proof-of-concept prototypes and scalable enterprise products for promising cybersecurity solutions leveraging AI/ML, ensuring alignment with Visa’s existing security architecture and strategic goals.
- Identify and assess innovative cybersecurity tools, companies, and concepts that can enhance Visa’s security architecture.
- Work closely with internal stakeholders, including the Cybersecurity Product Development team, to transition prototypes into fully operational products and solutions.
- Automate security tools and processes to advance security capabilities across key cybersecurity areas, including access control, defense-in-depth, secure coding practices, and AI agent governance.
- Continuously monitor and analyze emerging cybersecurity trends, technologies, and practices that have the potential to impact Visa’s security posture.
- Stay up to date on new security tools & techniques in the information security space.
- You’ll be working on enabling/building security on various platforms and technologies which protect the applications from attacks like:
- Payment processing platforms, Payment Wallet solutions, Consumer facing applications, COTS products deployed in house, public clouds, Issuer/Acquirer facing platforms and applications, white labelled solutions for partners.
- zTPF, zOS, MVS, Linux, Windows, VMWare, Openstack, SDN, Public cloud like AWS, Google
- Cybersecurity tools like IDS, SIEM, Tripwire, Tanium, Netwitness, Netflow, WAF
- HSMs, Tokenization systems, data encryption solutions from Safenet, Vormetric etc
- Web technologies like HTTP, SOAP, REST services, AJAX
- Databases like Oracle, MS SQL, Couchbase, Cassandra, Riak, Aerospike
- Caching services like Kafka, Coherence, MQ
- Big-data like Hadoop
- Web Access Management solutions like Forgerock, Siteminder, Custom/in-house Security Frameworks.
Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.
Qualifications
Basic Qualifications:
- 2+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelors degree, OR 5+ years of relevant work experience.
- Agentic AI Development experience
- Experience in developing highly available and scalable enterprise services using Python. Experience with Java, Go, Rust or any other object-oriented programming language.
- hands-on experience with GenAI technologies — including LLMs, prompt engineering, embeddings, fine-tuning, and AI agents or agentic pipelines.
- Cybersecurity training or education.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Specialist: 2 - 5 years of relevant work experience.
- 1 year of Agentic AI Development experience
- Cybersecurity training or education.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science (or equivalent) from an accredited university.
- Minimum of 3+ years of experience in developing highly available and scalable enterprise services using Python. Experience with Java, Go, Rust or any other object-oriented programming language is a plus.
- 1+ years of hands-on experience with GenAI technologies — including LLMs, prompt engineering, embeddings, fine-tuning, and AI agents or agentic pipelines.
- Strong software engineering background with experience in Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX..
- Hands-on experience with LLMs (e.g., GPT, Claude, Mistral), vector databases (e.g., FAISS, Pinecone), and orchestration tools (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, Autogen).
- Hands-on experience with design and development tools like IntelliJ, VSCode, Postman, and Jupyter.
- Expertise in evaluating various large language models (LLMs), assessing their performance, and comparing their capabilities to identify suitable models based on business requirements.
- Hands-on experience with AI model APIs and AI agent frameworks.
- Proficiency in modern backend architectures, including cloud-native development (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure), containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and distributed systems.
- Proficiency in working with both RDBMS and NoSQL databases.
- Proven ability to build Threat Models and analyze security weaknesses in complex deployments with varying technology stack
- Expertise in securing the integration of multiple environments across on-premises, multi-cloud, and hybrid architectures. Strong understanding of application and network security.
- Good understanding of current compliance, regulatory and legal requirements relevant to the transaction processing industry such as PCI, HIPPA, SOX, and GLB.
- Ability to multi-task in a dynamic and fast paced environment.
- Solid understanding of software development best practices and principles.
- Experience with Agile methodologies and practices.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with attention to detail.
- Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams.
Information for US Applicants
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 protect veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.How we rate this
Cybersecurity Engineer at Visa rates 25 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Little AI. AI is not part of the work.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in cybersecurity jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $137k
- Typical cybersecurity job
- $160k
This posting starts 14% below the typical cybersecurity job. See cybersecurity jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you structure and test a prompt to get consistent output from a language model?
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
- Tell me about a project where cybersecurity was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where product security was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Prompt engineering, AI agents, Fine-tuning, Cybersecurity, and Product Security. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
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