Chief Software Engineer

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

The Value‑Added Services Product Development (VAS PD) team drives diversification of Visa’s revenue through differentiated, network‑agnostic products that extend the power of the Visa ecosystem. Within VAS, the Risk and Security Solutions (RAS) team delivers mission‑critical, AI‑driven risk, fraud, authentication, and identity platforms serving issuers, merchants, fintechs, and partners at global scale.

The Chief Software Engineer in the RAS Product Development team is a senior technical authority responsible for defining and executing enterprise‑scale technology strategy, cloud‑native architecture, and engineering excellence aligned to business outcomes. This role provides deep technical leadership across Acceptance and Authentication Risk platforms (Visa Enhanced Authentication, Visa Secure, Cardinal, Decision Manager) and Identity platforms (Identity Graph and Device Intelligence).

This position requires hands‑on expertise in public cloud, distributed systems, security‑first design, and Generative / Agentic AI, with a strong focus on developer productivity, platform leverage, and client‑facing innovation.

Essential Functions

• Define, own, and evolve the end‑to‑end technical vision, architecture, and execution strategy for RAS platforms, ensuring alignment with business objectives while accelerating innovation, scalability, and time‑to‑market.
• Architect, design, and implement high‑throughput, low‑latency, highly available (99.999%+) distributed systems supporting real‑time transaction processing, authentication, and identity services at global scale.
• Lead the enterprise adoption of Generative AI and Agentic AI to achieve 10X gains in developer productivity, including AI‑assisted coding, testing, observability, security analysis, and autonomous agents for platform operations, as well as AI‑powered, client‑facing product capabilities.
• Establish and institutionalize modern software engineering best practices, including CI/CD automation, DevSecOps, Infrastructure‑as‑Code, and policy‑driven governance to improve quality, velocity, and operational resilience across the SSDLC.
• Drive cloud‑first, cloud‑native architecture across AWS and/or Azure, optimizing for resiliency, elasticity, performance, cost efficiency, and zero‑trust security using managed services, containers, and serverless technologies.
• Actively contribute to critical path initiatives by developing core frameworks, shared services, automation platforms, reference architectures, and proof‑of‑concepts to validate emerging technologies and accelerate product delivery.
• Provide technical leadership at scale, setting architectural standards, engineering KPIs, and execution priorities while enabling high‑performing teams to deliver complex, multi‑year platform roadmaps.
• Partner cross‑functionally with security, privacy, risk, compliance, governance, and business stakeholders to deliver compliant, secure, and resilient solutions meeting strict non‑functional requirements and regulatory expectations.
• Translate complex technical strategies into clear, executive‑level narratives, influencing senior leadership, product management, and external partners through data‑driven decision‑making.
• Mentor and coach senior engineers, staff engineers, and engineering managers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, innovation, and knowledge sharing through design reviews, tech talks, and one‑on‑one mentorship.
• Implement rigorous engineering excellence practices across design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and incident response to uphold platform reliability, security, and architectural integrity.
• Exemplify and reinforce Visa’s Leadership Principles by acting as an owner, promoting collaboration, and executing with operational and technical excellence.
• This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

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

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• 12+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 9 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e