Database Engineer - Sr. Consultant level

Company Description

Founded by experienced entrepreneurs and engineers in 2016, Pismo is a technology company that provides a comprehensive processing platform for banking, card issuing and financial market infrastructure and helps customers innovate and build the next generation of banking and payment solutions. Pismo joined Visa in 2024.

Leveraging Visa’s solutions, our core platform, and an expanding suite of capabilities, Pismo addresses the technological challenges that large banks, marketplaces, and fintech companies face in migrating from legacy systems to more advanced technology in the market. Pismo’s cloud-based platform empowers firms to build and launch financial products rapidly, scaling as they grow to have a broader audience while keeping high security and availability standards.

Pismo’s 500+ employees are located in more than 10 countries around the world.

Job Description

About Visa and Pismo

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 processing networks, supporting secure transactions at global scale.

Pismo is a cloud‑native financial services company operating as part of Visa. We build and deliver scalable payment and banking services for financial institutions worldwide. Our platforms demand strong correctness, resilience, security, and performance—especially in our data stores and database platforms.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Senior Consultant Database Architect—a senior individual contributor who acts as a technical authority and architectural leader for Pismo’s database and data storage ecosystem.

In this role you will define database architecture and standards across teams, lead work where requirements are ambiguous or evolving, and be accountable for database outcomes end‑to‑end: from logical and physical design through implementation, performance, reliability, security, operations, and adoption.

While this is a hands‑on role, your impact will increasingly come from technical direction, design leadership, mentoring, and raising the bar across the organization.

What You'll Do

Database Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Define and evolve database architecture strategies across Pismo, including data modeling standards, schema governance, indexing strategies, partitioning/sharding approaches, and lifecycle management.
• Act as a technical authority for database design decisions, guiding teams toward scalable, maintainable, and secure patterns.
• Lead architecture for database systems supporting high-throughput, low-latency, highly available financial services.
• Drive pragmatic trade-offs balancing performance, resilience, correctness, cost, and developer productivity.

End-to-End Ownership (Design to Production to Adoption)

• Own database initiatives across the full lifecycle: requirements discovery, design, proof-of-concept, implementation guidance, rollout, operationalization, and ongoing improvement.
• Establish and enforce non-functional requirements for data systems: availability, RPO/RTO, performance SLOs, backup/restore, disaster recovery, and capacity planning.
• Partner with engineering teams to ensure production readiness: runbooks, monitoring/alerting, on-call enablement, and safe change management.

Reliability, Security & Compliance by Design

• Architect secure database solutions with strong access controls, encryption, auditing, data retention, and privacy-aware design.
• Define safe practices for schema changes, data migrations, and online maintenance, minimizing downtime and reducing operational risk.
• Improve observability and incident response for data systems through standard metrics, tracing patterns (where applicable), and operational playbooks.

Organizational Impact & Cross-Team Influence

• Influence technical roadmaps and priorities by identifying systemic issues in data architecture and platform capabilities.
• Collaborate across Product, Platform, Security, and Application squads to ensure database designs support business goals and delivery timelines.
• Break down large database initiatives into phased milestones, guiding teams through delivery with clear architectural checkpoints.

Mentorship, Culture & Hiring

• Mentor engineers at scale via design reviews, query and schema reviews, pairing on complex problems, and coaching teams on best practices.
• Be a steward of engineering culture—raise the qu