Staff 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

Visa’s Technology Organization is a community of problem solvers and innovators reshaping the future of commerce.   We operate the world’s most sophisticated processing networks capable of handling more than 65k secure transactions a second across 80M merchants, 15k Financial Institutions, and billions of everyday people.   While working with us you’ll get to work on complex distributed systems and solve massive scale problems centered on new payment flows, business and data solutions, cyber security, and B2C platforms.     

The Opportunity: 

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer (Backend) to design, build, and operate scalable, high‑performance backend systems, including services enhanced with Generative AI and agent‑based capabilities. In this role, you will work closely with senior engineers, product partners, and platform teams to deliver reliable microservices that power business‑critical applications. 

This is a hands‑on senior individual contributor role. You will contribute to technical design, mentor engineers, perform code reviews, and help integrate AI‑powered features—such as LLM‑backed services, agent workflows, and context‑aware systems—into production environments. The ideal candidate combines deep Java backend expertise with practical experience applying modern AI tools and techniques to real‑world software development. 

The Skills You Bring:

Key Responsibilities 

Backend Engineering & System Design 

• Design, develop, test, and document scalable backend services using Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, and MySQL. 
• Build and maintain microservice‑based, multi‑tier applications that meet performance, reliability, and security requirements. 
• Develop RESTful APIs and event‑driven services that integrate cleanly with downstream systems. 
• Apply engineering standards, processes, and best practices throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). 
• Develop complex database queries and resolve defects in existing codebases. 
• Contribute to deployment procedures, environment configuration, and release readiness. 
• Produce highly available, high‑performance services capable of scaling under load. 

 Generative AI & Developer Productivity:  

• Apply context engineering techniques, including use of memory banks, conversation state, and external knowledge sources, to improve relevance and consistency of AI‑powered features.  
• Design and maintain prompt engineering strategies to ensure reliable, secure, and high‑quality LLM responses across backend services.  
• Implement and integrate Model Context Protocol (MCP) patterns to enable structured tool access, context sharing, and interoperability between AI agents and backend APIs.  
• Integrate AI agents into production applications, enabling task automation, decision support, or intelligent workflows within backend services.  
• Leverage AI‑assisted development tools (e.g., Claude, GitHub Copilot, or similar) in day‑to‑day coding activities to improve development velocity, code quality, and maintainability.  
• Establish best practices for human‑in‑the‑loop workflows, fallback handling, and observability for AI‑driven features. 

Scalability, Reliability & Operations 

• Design and support distributed, fault‑tolerant systems using event‑driven and asynchronous patterns. 
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and cloud‑native deployments using Docker, Kubernetes, and related tooling. 
• Support monitoring, logging, and alerting to ensure system health and operational excellence. 
• Participate in troubleshooting production issues and driving continuous system improvements. 

 Collaboration & Technical Leadership 

• Perform thorough code and design reviews to maintain high engineering standards. 
• Mentor junior and mid‑level engineers through technical guidance and example. 
• Collaborate with cross‑functional partners to preserve business goals and technical requirements. 
• Contribute to shared libraries, patterns, and engineering documentation. 

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

Qualifications

Basic