Director, Software Engineering

About Us

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

Job Summary

The Acceptance Solutions Product Development team are the engineers responsible for a portfolio of products that drive diversification of Visa revenue, differentiate our network, and deliver value-added solutions across other rails. This is part of a strategy to increase total merchant value by developing solutions that address complex and emerging needs of both merchants and acquirers. Our mission is to drive the future of payment acceptance, helping our clients navigate digital commerce complexities and address an increasing need for flexibility and agility.

The goal of the Visa Acceptance Platform is to be the world’s most open payment platform by delivering market leading, globally relevant, omnichannel acceptance componentry through open, composable, modular APIs delivered with Visa-grade resilience, security, maintenance, and scale.

We are seeking a dynamic, hands-on engineering leader to lead teams building secure, high-performing distributed systems for payment acceptance. Our technology stack includes Java, Containers, Kafka, relational databases, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern cloud-native engineering practices. The ideal candidate brings strong software engineering depth, proven people leadership, and the ability to stay close to day-to-day design, code, architecture, delivery, and operational decisions while partnering with architecture, product, security, and operations teams to deliver resilient platforms at scale.

This role requires a leader who can balance strategic direction with active hands-on engineering involvement, apply AI/ML and Generative AI to improve engineering productivity and business outcomes, and mentor engineers to grow their technical capabilities and careers. This is an opportunity to lead talented teams while remaining deeply engaged in the technical details that shape secure, scalable payment acceptance. Be a part of our mission to shape the future of secure payments.

Essential Functions

• Serve as the hands-on technical lead for Payment Processing Platform across the Visa Acceptance Platform, providing technical direction across architecture, design, implementation, scalability, resiliency, and operational readiness.
• Lead the design, implementation, and deployment of secure, reliable, robust, and interoperable payment acceptance products.
• Provide engineering leadership to ensure solutions align with platform principles, architecture standards, and Visa-grade availability, resiliency, and operational excellence expectations.
• Remain actively hands-on with architecture, design reviews, code reviews, proof-of-concepts, performance analysis, debugging, technical troubleshooting, production-readiness, and critical delivery decisions on a day-to-day basis.
• Apply AI/ML, Generative AI, automation, and intelligent engineering practices to improve software delivery, search relevance, analytics capabilities, operational insight, developer productivity, and business outcomes.
• Define and execute the technical strategy for payment processing and acceptance platforms in alignment with product vision, business priorities, and long-term platform evolution.
• Drive delivery of fit-for-purpose products and platform capabilities that improve time-to-market while maintaining security, quality, scalability, and reliability.
• Design and evolve secure, reliable, and scalable search, indexing, analytics, enrichment, and data-processing capabilities that support high-volume payment acceptance use cases.
• Provide technical leadership for modern, intuitive, secure, and performant user interfaces that enable search, analytics, reporting, operational insights, and data-driven workflows for internal and external users.
• Set technical direction for event-driven data flows, transaction enrichment, search indexing, analytics pipelines, user-facing dashboards, observability, and operational insights in alignment with product, platform, security, user experience, and business objectives.
• Lead technical design for event correlation, transaction matching, retry handling, dead-letter queues, replay, idempotency, exactly-once processing considerations, and high-throughput data movement.
• Establish and continuously improve engineering best practices for application development, testing, deployment, observability, monitoring, incident response, and operational readiness, strengthening reliability, performance, maintainability, developer productivity, and operational excellence across Search and Analytics capabilities.
• Partner with application, data, platform, product, regional, business, client-facing, security, privacy, risk, governance, compliance, and operations teams to translate requirements into high-quality solutions that meet functional and non-functional requirements (security, latency, availability, compliance, maintainability) and applicable policies, standards, regulatory expectations, and customer commitments.
• Communicate and present technical strategy, tradeoffs, risks, dependencies, delivery progress, and recommendations clearly, adapting to audiences that include executive leaders, business partners, product partners, architecture forums, and engineering teams.
• Coach, mentor, and develop engineers, senior engineers, technical leads, and engineering leaders through regular feedback, design reviews, architecture discussions, hands-on problem solving, technical deep dives, brown bag sessions, tech talks, production troubleshooting, and career development conversations.
• Build and lead high-performing teams by promoting collaboration, constructive debate, accountability, inclusion, and execution excellence consistent with Visa Leadership Principles.
• Bring forward new ideas, engineering improvements, and technology recommendations that increase team effectiveness, improve developer productivity, and advance platform capabilities.
• Influence technical strategy across teams without relying on formal reporting authority, using strong engineering judgment, collaboration, credibility, and hands-on technical depth.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelors degree, 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.
• Demonstrated success leading high-performing, multi-disciplinary, and geographically distributed software engineering teams, including people management, coaching, performance development, delivery accountability, and hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical talent.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating globally distributed, mission-critical systems that require high availability, scalability, resiliency, and security, and that support very high transaction volumes with strict availability, latency, security, and compliance requirements.
• Proven ability to solve complex technical and organizational problems across multiple domains, systems, and teams.
• Experience setting technical direction, influencing architecture and delivery strategy, and aligning engineering execution with product and business objectives.
• Strong proficiency in modern software engineering practices, programming languages, API design, system design, testing, deployment, and operational excellence, with a strong hands-on background in API-first software product development using technologies such as Java/J2EE, Spring Boot, Vert.x, REST, Kafka, Hazelcast, Git, Maven, CI/CD pipelines, and test automation.
• Recent hands-on experience with architecture, design, coding practices, code reviews, debugging, production support, and technical decision-making in complex software systems.
• Experience with cloud platforms, Kubernetes, containerized deployment models, and modern DevOps practices.
• Experience with event-driven architecture, streaming platforms such as Kafka, and high-throughput transaction or data processing systems, including resilient patterns such as event correlation, transaction matching, retry mechanisms, dead-letter queues, replay, idempotency, and exactly-once processing considerations.
• Experience delivering secure software platforms, including familiarity with authentication, authorization, encryption, identity, and secure engineering practices.
• rack record of mentoring engineers, developing technical leaders, and building strong engineering culture.
• Experience applying AI-enabled engineering practices, automation, or developer productivity improvements across software delivery teams, and implementing, deploying, or governing AI/ML, Generative AI, or agentic AI capabilities in production environments or engineering workflows.
• Experience in payments, financial services, fintech, or high-scale transaction processing environments, including payment processing, transaction lifecycle concepts, payment network protocols, and acceptance workflows.
• Experience partnering with executive leadership, product leaders, technical product managers, regional teams, and business stakeholders to define strategy, roadmaps, requirements, priorities, and delivery plans.
• Experience with financial services compliance, risk, and control requirements such as PCI-DSS, SOX, security standards, audit readiness, and operational controls.
• Strong experience with agile delivery, software development lifecycle practices, engineering metrics, continuous improvement, developer productivity, and operational performance management.
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, communication, and influencing skills, with the ability to form, advocate, and communicate an independent technical viewpoint grounded in hands-on engineering experience.
• Long-term strategic thinker who stays current with emerging technologies and translates them into practical engineering and business outcomes.
• Highly driven, resourceful, results-oriented, and collaborative, with strong communication skills and a focus on durable, win-win outcomes.

Visa is an EEO Employer

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.