Director - Software Engineering (Java, Spring Boot, Kafka - 15+ years exp)

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:

Payments are a very exciting and fast-developing area with a lot of new and innovative ideas coming to market. With strong demand for new solutions in this space, it promises to be an exciting area of innovation. Visa is a strong leader in the payment industry and is rapidly transitioning into a technology company with significant investments in this area.

If you want to be in the exciting payment space, learn fast and make big impacts, Ecosystem & Operational Risk technology which is part of Visa’s Value-Added Services business unit is an ideal place for you!

The Ecosystem & Operational Risk team is responsible for building critical risk and fraud detection services at Visa. This includes idea generation, architecture, design, development, and testing of products, applications, and services that provide solutions to detect, prevent, and mitigate fraud for Visa and its clients.

Ensures development work integrates responsibly with AI/ML capabilities-including Generative AI and Agentic AI coding-and that all outputs adhere to established data governance, model explainability, and financial regulatory compliance standards. Acts as a leader for engineering teams, removing blockers, enabling productivity, and fostering an inclusive, high-performance culture. Coaches and develops engineers to adapt to evolving tools, frameworks, and AI-driven workflows. Partners closely with product managers, QA, risk, compliance, and security functions to deliver safe, transparent, and customer-centric solutions. Comfortable with hands-on coding, code reviews, and technical prototyping to guide best practices and maintain technical credibility.

All roles require digital fluency, including the ability to work with emerging technologies such as Generative AI tools (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot etc.,) to support everyday work.

Key Responsibilities:

• Monitors throughput across multiple teams to determine capacity and oversees partnerships with stakeholders to define user requirements for complex projects.

• Guides requirements gathering, feedback incorporation, and actionable metrics to assess delivery feasibility and reviews gaps in acceptance criteria.

• Oversees translation of user requirements into system designs, ensuring alignment with business strategy and formalizing best practices.

• Leads system architecture discussions, interprets findings from investigations, and owns design decisions for complex products.

• Oversees project plans, release plans, and estimation processes, addressing escalated issues and removing technical obstacles.

• Develops standards for code quality, security, and maintainability; updates security assessment processes to ensure code is free from threats.

• Shapes best practices for debugging, automation, and code review across multiple products and teams.

• Provides guidance on test planning, prioritizes tests, and ensures expected testing results across product features.

• Leads system monitoring efforts, sets data analysis standards, and aligns project strategy for long-term value.

• Provides technical expertise to resolve major incidents, ensures teams have resources to respond to incidents, and shares learnings to prevent recurrence.

• Manages team decisions around developer tools, oversees selection and enhancement of tools, and shares best practices for complex products.

• Identifies and develops engineering talent, ensures team skills support business goals, and disseminates knowledge to improve product reliability and performance.

Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• 15+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree, OR an advanced degree

• Experience in leading software engineering teams in fintech, payments, or banking technologies/software systems.

• Proven expertise across modern technology stacks, including Java/J2EE, Spring Boot, React, RESTful APIs, SQL/NoSQL databases, Kubernetes, Kafka.

• Experience in developing and/or implementing web-based or mobile applications. Experience working with container-based technologies.

• Experience in a leadership role with direct reports.

• Experience in requirements gathering, system design, and architecture for complex software solutions.

• Experience in agile delivery management and DevSecOps practices.

• Experience in code development, review, and debugging for enterprise-scale applications.

• Experience in test planning, execution, and automation.

• Experience in incident response and resolution for software engineering teams.

• Experience in talent management, coaching, and engineering development.

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.