Sr. Director - Software Engineering (Java, GenAI, Payment Risk, Cloud, NoSQL - 18+ years' exp)

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:

Within VISA Value Added Services, our mission is to build differentiated acceptance, issuing and risk and security products for merchants, acquirers, issuers and partners across all segments, verticals and geographies.

Visa is seeking a Senior Director of Software Engineering to lead engineering for key capabilities within the Risk and Security Solutions (RAS) organization.  This is a deeply technical role for an AI-forward engineering leader who combines organizational leadership with strong hands-on software engineering, architecture and delivery ownership.

You will lead a high-performing team of engineers and AI agents responsible for building and operating high-scale, mission-critical, distributed systems that power customer-facing risk and security products.  You will be expected to go beyond directional leadership: this role requires an AI-forward leader who can personally engage in architecture, design, code reviews, technical problem solving, production issue resolution, and where necessary hands-on code contribution to accelerate delivery, unblock teams, and raise the engineering bar.  You will own the technical strategy and execution for systems that must meet demanding requirements for availability, resilience, throughput, latency, security, compliance, and operability.  You will work closely with Product, Architecture, Security, SRE/Operations and partner teams across geographies to deliver customer value with speed and quality.

Essential Functions:

• Own the technical architecture, design, implementation, and delivery of customer-facing Risk & Security products and platform capabilities.
• Translate product strategy into scalable, secure, resilient, and operable distributed systems.
• Actively participate in code, design and architecture reviews, root-cause analysis, and contribute code when needed to unblock teams or accelerate critical initiatives.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for agentic development lifecycle, context engineering, code quality evals, performance, scalability, availability, observability, maintainability, and secure software delivery.
• Partner with Product Management, Cybersecurity, SRE/Operations to deliver solutions that maximize customer value, platform health, and execution predictability.
• Build and execute technology roadmaps that balance business priorities, engineering sustainability, technical debt reduction, and operational efficiency.
• Drive adoption of engineering best practices including CI/CD, test automation and telemetry.
• Communicate technical strategy, execution status, key tradeoffs, risks, and architectural decisions clearly to senior leadership.
• Attract, retain and grow high-performing engineering talent.
• Enable technical and process innovation through thought leadership and influence.
• Understand current and future trends within the payments industry.

Required Key Competencies:

• Led a team of 40+ made up of full-time employees, contractors and AI agents.
• Proven hands-on technical leadership by actively participating in code and design reviews.
• Built a culture of engineering excellence (context engineering, code quality evals, security, performance, scalability, availability, resilience etc.)
• Effectively managed complex technical interdependencies across geographical teams.
• Partnered with product management in developing a strategy and roadmap that align with business and engineering goals.
• Partnered with remote teams to ensure alignment across product development.  Bring a global mindset.
• Demonstrated ability to hire, coach, retain, and develop high-performing engineers and engineering leaders while raising the overall technical bar of the organization.
• Enabled innovation through thought leadership and influence.
• Deep expertise in building and operating high-scale distributed systems with demanding requirements for latency, throughput, resilience, security, and availability.
• Strong architectural judgment across service decomposition, API design, asynchronous messaging, data consistency, caching, failure isolation, and recovery strategies.
• Excellent execution leadership with the ability to align teams, prioritize effectively, manage risk, and deliver against commitments in ambiguous or high-pressure environments.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills with the ability to influence Product, Operations, and senior stakeholders through technical credibility and data-driven communication.

Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• 18+ years of relevant work experience with a bachelor’s degree or with an Advanced degree

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Agentic development and effective use of AI models, tools and agents.
• Significant experience leading the design and delivery of complex, enterprise-scale distributed systems in domains with high transaction volume, integration complexity, and stringent non-functional requirements.
• Strong hands-on engineering background in Java, Go, Rust, JavaScript etc. and modern backend development frameworks, with experience in concurrent or reactive architectures such as Vertx, or similar.
• Proven experience building microservices and service-based platforms using HTTP, REST, gRPC JSON, and modern service contract/interface design patterns.
• Strong working knowledge of distributed web architecture, including service discovery, containerized deployment models, distributed caching, event streaming, NoSQL, and RDBMS technologies.
• Experience designing and operating highly available, fault-tolerant, scalable, and observable services in production environments.
• Strong understanding of event-driven architecture, enterprise integration patterns, asynchronous processing, and API-based system interoperability.
• Experience with DevOps and modern software delivery practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, deployment automation, release orchestration, and capacity/performance planning.
• Strong understanding of application and platform security, including secure design, secure coding, access control, threat awareness, and contemporary security risks and controls.
• Experience with Agile engineering practices, technical governance, roadmap planning, dependency management, and execution in globally distributed organizations.
• Demonstrated ability to identify, communicate, and mitigate technical, operational, and delivery risk across a portfolio of products or multiple engineering teams.
• Strong analytical, architectural, and organizational leadership skills, with the ability to influence senior leadership and drive decisions through clarity, technical depth, and disciplined execution.

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.