Senior Director of Engineering, Banking & Issuing Risk

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 the world’s leader in digital payments technology, VISA connects the world through the most creative, reliable and secure payment platform – enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive.  At Visa, you join a culture of purpose and belonging – where your growth is priority, your identity is embraced, and the work you do matters.  We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere.  Your work will have a direct impact on billions of people around the world – helping unlock financial access to enable the future of money movement.

Within VISA Value Added Services, our mission is to build differentiated acceptance, issuing and risk and security products for merchants, acquirers, issuers and partners across all segments, verticals and geographies.

Visa is seeking a Senior Director of Software Engineering to lead engineering for key capabilities within the Risk and Security Solutions (RAS) organization.  This is a deeply technical role for an AI-forward engineering leader who combines organizational leadership with strong hands-on software engineering, architecture and delivery ownership.

You will lead a high-performing team of engineers and AI agents responsible for building and operating high-scale, mission-critical, distributed systems that power customer-facing risk and security products.  You will be expected to go beyond directional leadership: this role requires an AI-forward leader who can personally engage in architecture, design, code reviews, technical problem solving, production issue resolution, and where necessary hands-on code contribution to accelerate delivery, unblock teams, and raise the engineering bar.  You will own the technical strategy and execution for systems that must meet demanding requirements for availability, resilience, throughput, latency, security, compliance, and operability.  You will work closely with Product, Architecture, Security, SRE/Operations and partner teams across geographies to deliver customer value with speed and quality.

Essential Functions

• Own the technical architecture, design, implementation, and delivery of customer-facing Risk & Security products and platform capabilities.
• Translate product strategy into scalable, secure, resilient, and operable distributed systems.
• Actively participate in code, design and architecture reviews, root-cause analysis, and contribute code when needed to unblock teams or accelerate critical initiatives.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for agentic development lifecycle, context engineering, code quality evals, performance, scalability, availability, observability, maintainability, and secure software delivery.
• Partner with Product Management, Cybersecurity, SRE/Operations to deliver solutions that maximize customer value, platform health, and execution predictability.
• Build and execute technology roadmaps that balance business priorities, engineering sustainability, technical debt reduction, and operational efficiency.
• Drive adoption of engineering best practices including CI/CD, test automation and telemetry.
• Communicate technical strategy, execution status, key tradeoffs, risks, and architectural decisions clearly to senior leadership.
• Attract, retain and grow high-performing engineering talent.
• Enable technical and process innovation through thought leadership and influence.
• Understand current and future trends within the payments industry.

Required Key Competencies

• Led a team of 20 to 40 made up of full-time employees, contractors and AI agents.
• Proven hands-on technical leadership by actively participating in code and design reviews.
• Built a culture of engineering excellence (context engineering, code quality evals, security, performance, scalability, availability, resilience etc.)
• Effectively managed complex technical interdependencies across geographical teams.
• Partnered with product management in developing a strategy and roadmap that align with business and engineering goals.
• Partnered with remote teams to ensure alignment across product development.  Bring a global mindset.
• Demonstrated ability to hire, coach, retain, and develop high-performi