Sr. 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

Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior Director of Commercial Platform Engineering to lead enterprise-scale engineering teams responsible for the strategy, architecture, development, and delivery of modern commercial payments platforms. This leader will oversee the full lifecycle of critical payment acceptance capabilities for suppliers, partners, and internal stakeholders, ensuring platforms are secure, scalable, resilient, and aligned with business growth objectives.

The Senior Director will drive modernization, cloud transformation, automation, cross-platform integration, and GenAI-assisted engineering practices to improve engineering velocity, product quality, and developer effectiveness. This role requires a strong technical leader who can operate at both strategic and execution levels, partnering closely with product, technology, operations, infrastructure, risk, and business executives to deliver high-impact platform outcomes.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead platform engineering teams responsible for the full lifecycle of commercial payments capabilities, including architecture, design, development, testing, deployment, reliability, and production support.
• Set the engineering strategy and technical direction for large-scale distributed payment platforms, with a focus on performance, scalability, resiliency, security, and operational excellence.
• Own end-to-end delivery of enterprise platform initiatives, from concept and roadmap planning through execution, release deployment, and ongoing optimization.
• Drive next-generation capabilities for supplier and partner acceptance platforms, enabling seamless integrations, improved user experiences, and expanded business value.
• Lead modernization and cloud transformation efforts, establishing standards for cloud adoption, platform migration, cross-platform integration, automation, and secure software development.
• Champion GenAI-assisted engineering practices to improve development velocity, code quality, testing effectiveness, documentation, and overall developer productivity.
• Provide executive leadership in agile delivery environments, ensuring timely execution of strategic programs, committed modules, and product roadmap deliverables.
• Oversee automation framework strategy, testing modernization, CI/CD practices, release governance, and continuous integration activities across engineering teams.
• Partner with senior stakeholders and business leaders to define priorities, align technology investments with business outcomes, manage expectations, and resolve escalations.
• Accurately assess scope, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs, communicating impacts and mitigation strategies clearly to executive leadership, product teams, and cross-functional partners.
• Represent engineering in planning forums, executive reviews, escalation discussions, architecture governance, and roadmap prioritization sessions.
• Ensure strong data governance, system infrastructure readiness, platform reliability, and compliance alignment across supported products and services.
• Build, mentor, and develop high-performing engineering teams, fostering a culture of accountability, innovation, inclusion, engineering excellence, and continuous improvement.
• Establish metrics and operating mechanisms to track delivery performance, quality, reliability, security posture, operational health, and developer effectiveness.

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

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• 12+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelors degree, OR 15+ years of relevant work experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• 15 or more years of experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or 12 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, or MD), PhD with 9+ years of experience
• Significant experience leading software engineering, platform engineering, or technology delivery organizations at scale.
• Proven background managing managers and senior technical leaders across complex enterprise technology environments.
• Deep experience architecting and delivering large-scale distributed systems, APIs, microservices, event-driven platforms, or high-volume transaction-processing systems.
• Strong understanding of commercial payments, payment acceptance, supplier platforms, partner ecosystems, or financial technology platforms preferred.
• Demonstrated success leading cloud modernization, platform transformation, automation, CI/CD, DevOps, and engineering excellence initiatives.
• Experience driving enterprise-level technology strategy while maintaining execution discipline across multiple teams or portfolios.
• Strong knowledge of security, resiliency, performance engineering, observability, data governance, and infrastructure operations.
• Proven ability to manage executive stakeholders, influence cross-functional priorities, communicate trade-offs, and lead through ambiguity.
• Experience introducing or scaling GenAI-assisted engineering tools and practices to enhance productivity, quality, and delivery outcomes.
• Excellent leadership, communication, decision-making, problem-solving, and organizational management skills.

• Experience in financial services, commercial payments, B2B payments, merchant/supplier acceptance, or enterprise transaction platforms.

• Experience leading global or distributed engineering teams.
• Familiarity with public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
• Knowledge of compliance, risk, regulatory, or audit expectations within financial services environments.
• Experience with API platforms, partner integrations, service-oriented architecture, microservices, cloud-native platforms, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Track record of delivering modernization programs across both legacy and cloud-native ecosystems.
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts into business impact for executive audiences.

Information for US Applicants

Work Hours

Varies upon the needs of the department.

Travel Requirements

This position requires travel 5-10% of the time.

Mental/Physical Requirements

This position will be performed in an office setting. The position will require the incumbent to sit and stand at a desk, communicate in person and by telephone, frequently operate standard office equipment, such as telephones and computers.

Visa is an EEO Employer