Sr. Director of System Architecture

Company Description

Visa is a world leader in payments and technology, with over 259 billion payments transactions flowing safely between consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government entities in more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable, and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive while driven by a common purpose – to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

Make an impact with a purpose-driven industry leader. Join us today and experience Life at Visa.

Job Description

The Acceptance Solutions Product Development team are the engineers responsible for a portfolio of products that drive diversification of Visa revenue, differentiate our network, and deliver value-added solutions across other rails. This is part of a strategy to increase total merchant value by developing solutions that address complex and emerging needs of both merchants and acquirers. Our mission is to drive the future of payment acceptance, helping our clients navigate digital commerce complexities and address an increasing need for flexibility and agility.

The goal of the Visa Acceptance Platform is to be the world’s most open payment platform by delivering market leading, globally relevant, omnichannel acceptance componentry through open, composable, modular APIs delivered with Visa-grade resilience, security, maintenance, and scale.

We are seeking a strategic and visionary Senior Director of Architecture with a proven ability to lead by influence and a history of successfully delivering modern, large-scale, complex services and products. Your mission will be to provide hands-on leadership, building a world-class team of Architects, and driving the strategy that enables our Acceptance Solutions Product Development teams. This role is integral to our business growth, and we're looking for a leader who can align architectural vision with our business objectives, ensuring the successful delivery of our products and services.

This includes promoting a diverse culture of cross-functional collaboration, engineering excellence, and continuous improvement.  As an idea leader, you will bring industry best practices in Architecture to benefit the team and the wider organization. The ability to balance demanding business capabilities with building for operational excellence while meeting regulatory, security, and privacy requirements is crucial.

You should have the ability to quickly grasp and evaluate new ideas and technologies from internal and external sources. This includes staying updated with the latest trends and advancements in Architecture, Payments Infrastructure, and Generative AI.  We need of a strong technology leader, who is an expert in agile delivery, building purpose driven teams, and has a background in complex technology projects. Prior experience in payments, or a background in building high volume transaction and data processing systems is preferred.

The successful candidate will be comfortable navigating the challenging dynamic payments space and leading global teams responsible for platform transformation efforts. This candidate will also play a pivotal role in growing our Acceptance Solutions footprint, seeking new paths to revenue by building modular, open solutions that will scale with our business.

Essential Functions

• Drives the architecture for key cross team / cross product development projects (via architecture/design documents and developing code key modules)
• Establishes software development patterns and best practices via examples and shipping code
• Ensures that all relevant project teams follow a common set of principles and patterns and utilize a standard set of technology frameworks and libraries
• Provides leadership across the architecture community to ensure solutions are built in alignment with platform principles and standards
• Mentors and builds world-class high-performing engineering and data science teams
• Applies architecture best practices that helps increase execution velocity
• Develops architectures that are inherently secure, robust, scalable, modular, API-centric, and global.
• Influences technology selection for the enterprise
• Defines deployment topology by working with peers across the technology organization
• Optimizes use of Visa’s Platforms & Solutions
• Demonstrates thought leadership through presentations and teaching across Visa
• Build a culture of engineering excellence (quality, security, performance, scalability, availability, resilience etc.) across your own teams and the entire organization.
• Invest in the career development of your employees with a strong focus on mentorship and training.
• Lead with a strong clien