Lead Data Architect

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

Visa’s Technology Organization is a community of problem solvers and innovators reshaping the future of commerce. We operate one of the world’s most sophisticated global transaction networks—processing more than 65,000 secure transactions per second across 80 million merchants, 15,000 financial institutions, and billions of people worldwide.

Within Value‑Added Services (VAS), we are building AI‑native data foundations that transform how data is discovered, understood, and activated—enabling product intelligence, growth analytics, and real‑time decisioning across Visa’s ecosystem.

The Opportunity

We are seeking a Lead Data Architect to define and drive the vision for VAS Data Foundations—a hybrid, AI‑ready platform that consolidates company wide data into a unified, governed, and intelligent data layer.

This role sits at the intersection of data architecture, AI/ML, and product intelligence. You will shape how data flows from raw signals to semantic meaning to AI‑driven insights—powering dashboards, product analytics, AI agents, and executive decision‑making at global scale.

The Work Itself

• Define the end‑to‑end architectural vision for AI‑native data foundations, spanning cloud data platforms, semantic layers, AI metadata, and consumption layers.
• Lead consolidation of disparate data sources (on‑prem, Hadoop, acquisitions, cloud) into a single, accessible, governed data layer.
• Design and evolve an AI‑native semantic layer that enables any agent, analyst, or product to discover, query, and reason over data consistently.
• Enable agentic and self‑service analytics, including automated insights, metric discovery, product analytics, and “talk‑to‑data” experiences.
• Partner with Product, Business, AI and Data Science teams to operationalize AI Data Scientist capabilities for automated visualization, deep‑dive insights, and product intelligence.
• Establish architectural standards for data quality, metadata, lineage, observability, governance, and responsible AI usage.
• Guide platform evolution across data ingestion, ETL/ELT pipelines, scalable data models, metric catalogs, and presentation layers.
• Translate business and product needs (growth, churn, retention, fraud, performance) into durable data and semantic architectures.
• Influence and mentor senior engineers and architects, elevating architectural rigor and long‑term thinking across VAS.

Essential Functions

• Act as the principal architect for VAS Data Foundations, owning long‑term architectural coherence across data, AI, and analytics layers.
• Lead structured discovery with Product and Business stakeholders to align business questions to metrics to data model to semantic models to AI‑ready data products.
• Ensure platforms are hybrid cloud‑native, AI‑ready, privacy‑preserving, and globally scalable.
• Drive architectural decisions that balance speed, governance, reusability, and cost efficiency.
• Identify systemic patterns across data quality, usage, performance, and analytics friction—and drive foundational improvements.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in the office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager. 

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• 10+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 7 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 4 years of work experience with a PhD, 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
• Strong architectural mindset, with experience designing large‑scale data platforms, semantic layers, or analytics foundations.
• Deep understanding of cloud data ecosystems (data lakes, warehouses, streaming, ETL/ELT, metadata, governance).
• Experience working with or enabling AI/ML and LLM‑based analytics, including agent‑driven or conversational data experiences.
• Ability to think in systems and abstractions—data models, metrics, semantics, and contracts—not just pipel