Director, Software Engineering

Company Description

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

As a Director of Engineering  for a strategy-and-operations team that drives end‑to‑end delivery excellence across Acceptance Solutions within Value Added Services team at VISA , you will lead multiple engineering teams building enterprise‑scale platforms that improve engineering execution, operational decision‑making, and delivery safety. Your teams will develop systems that aggregate data, apply policy and intelligence, and enable both humans and automation to make better decisions at scale.

This role operates at the intersection of platform engineering, automation, governance, and developer experience, ensuring solutions are trusted, explainable, and scalable across regions and portfolios. It is a hands‑on leadership role at the architectural level, with accountability for both technical direction and people leadership.

Scope & Expectations

• Lead multiple engineering teams with a hands-on coding approach
• Provide architectural leadership through design reviews, technical trade‑off decisions, and validation of key proof‑of‑concepts
• Partner closely with Product, Architecture, Security, SRE, and Compliance leaders to define roadmaps and ensure platforms support reliability, risk reduction, and developer trust
• Drive adoption of AI/ML and GenAI capabilities in production systems, with an emphasis on explainability, auditability, and operational confidence
• Establish engineering standards that prioritize automation, quality, and predictable delivery at scale

What Success Looks Like

• Clear ownership and accountability across teams and platforms
• Scalable, resilient platforms that enable safe, data‑driven decision‑making
• Measurable improvements in delivery predictability, operational confidence, and engineering efficiency
• AI‑enabled systems delivering real business outcomes, not experimentation only

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• 10+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelors degree, OR 13+ years of relevant work experience

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
• Solid understanding of Large Language Models, Generative AI systems and applications.
• Background in developing and deploying AIML platforms and applications in on premises and public cloud infrastructure.
• Have prior hands-on experience using languages such as Python, Go, Java, Python, Rust. Strong on coding and code reviews.
• Experience in leading teams that have built full stack applications from the ground-up using distributed high performance and scalable technologies such as K8s, Docker, Ray, Airflow, Hadoop, Spark, Kafka and so on.
• Experience in leading teams that have built cloud platform solutions using AWS, Azure and GCP for high performance real time AIML applications
• Experience in DevSecOps world - Github/Git, CI/CD Pipelines, Jenkins, Ansible, Shell Scripts, Security Tools, Observability, Alerting, IaC etc.

Skills You’ll Bring:

• Strategic leadership with a proven ability to manage multiple teams and large-scale programs
• Deep technical expertise in modern architectures (microservices, cloud-native), security engineering, and API platforms
• Strong understanding of agile methodologies and software development lifecycle principles
• Ability to influence senior stakeholders and drive organizational change
• Experience balancing hands-on technical involvement with leadership responsibilities
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills
• Payments industry experience is a plus

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 sett