Lead Software Engineer (Director level)

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 Lead Software Engineer is a senior, cross-functional role focused on driving technical excellence across multiple engineering teams. The role operates across a distributed delivery model, partnering with engineers and technical leads to ensure alignment on architecture, engineering practices, and execution standards.

This position emphasizes technical leadership, mentorship, and strategic guidance rather than direct people management. The role supports teams working across a range of technologies (including Java, .NET, and full-stack environments) and is responsible for influencing technical direction, improving development practices, and ensuring high-quality delivery outcomes.

The Lead Software Engineer plays a key role in shaping development workflows, optimizing testing strategies, and guiding teams in delivering scalable, reliable, and maintainable solutions. While hands-on coding is not the primary focus, the role requires strong technical expertise to review solutions, support complex problem-solving, and maintain engineering standards.

Success in this role requires strong collaboration and communication skills, the ability to influence without direct authority, and experience working across multiple teams in a distributed environment. Experience in team leadership is considered an advantage, though not a strict requirement.

The role requires digital fluency, including the ability to work with emerging technologies such as Generative AI tools (e.g. Microsoft Copilot) to support everyday work.

Key Responsibilities

• Partners with multiple engineering teams to provide technical direction and ensure alignment with engineering standards and best practices

• Reviews system designs and architectural approaches, ensuring scalability, reliability, and alignment with business requirements

• Drives adoption of best practices across development workflows, including code reviews, testing strategies, and continuous improvement initiatives

• Supports teams in translating business requirements into effective technical solutions and implementation approaches

• Provides guidance on complex technical challenges and influences key engineering decisions across teams

• Promotes consistency in coding standards, design patterns, and software engineering principles

• Coaches and mentors engineers and technical leads, supporting their development and effectiveness

• Contributes to improving delivery efficiency through enhancements in processes, tooling, and engineering practices

• Supports test strategy improvements, including regression testing and quality assurance approaches

• Collaborates with cross-functional stakeholders, including product, architecture, and other engineering teams, to deliver high-quality solutions

• Helps ensure that delivered solutions meet internal quality standards and align with broader organizational goals

• Contributes to a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing engineering culture

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• 10+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree, OR 13+ years of relevant work experience.

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

• Experience in developing and/or implementing web-based or mobile applications.

• 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.

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.

• Experience in securities, payments, and banking technologies.

• Experience working with container-based technologies.

• Experience building and testing enterprise-scale web services.

• Experience in product development and working on internal or client-facing project or technical teams.

• Experience leading project teams.

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.