Sr. ML Scientist (4-6 years' experience, Build Transformer-based models, Inference Engineering)

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:

We're building AI that protects and powers global commerce and money movement. As a Senior ML Scientist, you'll work in a small world-class team of scientists and inference engineers to transform breakthrough research into real-world products, using machine learning, foundation models, and intelligent decision systems to solve high-impact challenges at unprecedented scale.

You will combine deep technical expertise with ownership, velocity, and influence. You will drive the scientific roadmap at scale, ensuring models are aligned, explainable, and robust, and you’ll collaborate with world‑class experts while influencing product strategy in a high‑stakes domain. 

The position offers access to top‑tier compute, tools, and datasets, and a collaborative, innovative culture focused on shaping the future of global payments.

Key Responsibilities:

• Extract insights from large-scale Visa datasets across business lines to define high-value, fit-for-purpose problems beyond payments - driving clarity and framing business impact with precision.
• Rapidly design, experiment, and deploy SOTA ML/AI models, owning the full lifecycle and ensuring solutions are scalable, measurable, and aligned with strategic goals.
• Lead future-forward AI/ML research, proactively identifying emerging techniques, publishing influential work, and filing patents to amplify Visa’s innovation footprint.
• Integrate models into production with engineering and product teams, building robust, compliant pipelines with an eye on velocity, reliability, and business outcomes.

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

Qualifications

• 4+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelors degree, OR with an Advanced Degree in computer science, machine learning or related field preferred
• Strong fundamentals in machine learning: Deep learning, RL, and optimization and solid understanding of the math behind them. You should be able to derive algorithms from first principles and understand their limitations. 
• Proven track record (3+ years) of building AI / ML models which can handle scale (think model architecture, size, latency, architecture, etc). You’ve shipped models that matter in production environments with real users and measurable impact. 
• You have experience in working in multiple domains, and have been able to connect different techniques to appropriate business problems, in the past. 
• Ownership and velocity: You take initiative, move fast, and iterate. You don’t wait for permission, you define the problem, build the solution, and drive it to completion.
• Fluency in code. You write clean, efficient Python, and you’re comfortable navigating large codebases. You treat code as a medium for clarity and experimentation. You have experience in PySpark, PyTorch, tensor flow, as well as GPU based compute environments. 
• Research mindset with product intuition. You know when to read papers and when to write them. You can balance novelty with practicality and know how to translate ideas into working systems. You are deeply technical covering both ML as well as deep learning fundamentals spanning design, pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation.
• Communication clarity. You can explain complex ideas simply, whether in a design doc, a pull request, or a hallway conversation. You write well and think clearly.

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.