Lead Software Engineer - job 1 of 50

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.

The Visa Acceptance Platform is the foundation for creating innovative payment solutions that drive exceptional customer experience. It lets you easily leverage a broad range of pre-integrated modular services and a growing ecosystem of technology and payments partners. Because it's Visa, the platform is secure, robust, and resilient. And because it's open, it will continue evolving to support you into the future.

At Visa, we believe AI technologies have the potential to radically transform commerce. We launched Visa Intelligent Commerce to enable this next era of commerce. This program provides the infrastructure and tools developers need to build trusted, agentic experiences. Make an impact with a purpose-driven industry leader. Join us today and be part of AI transformation journey at Visa.

We are looking for a versatile, curious, and energetic Lead Software Engineer to join our team of passionate and dedicated engineers. We are the backbone for innovative data science and artificial intelligence developments at Visa acceptance, and we thrive on solving complex challenges on a global scale! As a Lead Software Engineer, you will be an integral part of a multi-functional development team inventing, designing, building, and testing products that reach a truly global customer base.

• You will face big challenges and question the status quo, changing the way data products are developed at Visa! Come join us and see your efforts shape the digital future of payments.

• The focus is on defining, executing, and delivering product and technical features at scale quickly and promoting a diverse culture of cross-functional collaboration and engineering excellence. Be an idea leader and bring industry best practices to benefit the team and the wider organization. The ability to balance demanding business capabilities with building for operational excellence while meeting regulatory, security and privacy requirements.

• Ability to quickly grasp and evaluate new ideas and technologies from internal and external sources. Lead/Influence multiple teams, matching them with appropriate technology and business problems while building a culture of both innovation and drive for excellence.

• Transform our digital offerings by leveraging AI to enhance our current product line and develop exciting new products targeting our banking, fintech and integration partners, which will enable the next wave of innovation in payments. We need a strong technology leader, who is an expert in data science, agile delivery, building purpose driven teams, and has a background in complex integration projects. Prior experience in payments, or a background in building high volume transaction and data processing systems is preferred.

• The successful candidate will be comfortable navigating the challenging dynamic payments space and leading global teams responsible for platform transformation efforts. This candidate will play a pivotal role in our continued embrace of AI, seeking new paths to revenue by improving delivery efficiency and pushing forward for new products.

Essential Functions:

• Design, build, and ship AI-powered features and tools

• Convert AI concepts into concrete, working products with clear success metrics and measurable impact

• Provides technical expertise and mentors others to implement extensible, maintainable, and reusable code, defines framework, principles, coding patterns, guidelines, styles, and standard methodologies, and adheres to all security requirements for the application of artificial intelligence and data science.

• Ensures adherence to data management principles, governance, process, and tools to maintain data quality across products.

• Advises on technical specifications during discussions with collaborators (e.g., Product owners, business partners, Cybersecurity) to identify and clarify sophisticated technical or business requirements and identify business needs and upstream and/or downstream system/application dependencies.

• Defines technical standards for the design and documents the architecture for a complex product, using existing architecture design patterns.

• Oversees and establishes unit testing requirements of unit testing to confirm functional capability of code, acts as subject matter expert in testing for coding standards and security scans, strategically leads user acceptance testing in collaboration with customer across multiple domains.

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

Basic Qualifications:

• 10+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s degree, OR
• At least 7 years of experience with an advanced degree (e.g., Master’s, MBA, JD, MD), OR
• 4+ years of experience with a PhD, OR
• 13+ years of relevant work experience in lieu of a degree

Preferred Qualifications:

• 12+ years of experience with a Bachelor’s degree, OR
• 8–10 years of experience with an advanced degree (e.g., Master’s, MBA, JD, MD), OR
• 6+ years of experience with a PhD
• Strong understanding of Generative AI technologies, with hands-on experience building products using large language models (LLMs)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and tools such as Git, Maven, Jenkins, Chef, Sonar, and JUnit
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies and Test-Driven Development (TDD)
• At least 3 years of experience building and deploying code to production environments
• Solid understanding of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), including testing strategies, automation, deployment, and release processes
• Deep expertise in observability, including monitoring, logging, and alerting
• Experience leveraging Generative AI tools to support code development
• Strong knowledge of data structures, including data organization, storage, relationships, and operations for efficient access and modification

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.  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.

Visa will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable local law, including the requirements of Article 49 of the San Francisco Police Code.

U.S. APPLICANTS ONLY: The estimated salary range for this position is 173,100.00 to 276,800.00 USD per year, which may include potential sales incentive payments (if applicable). Salary may vary depending on job-related factors which may include knowledge, skills, experience, and location. In addition, this position may be eligible for bonus and equity. Visa has a comprehensive benefits package for which this position may be eligible that includes Medical, Dental, Vision, 401 (k), FSA/HSA, Life Insurance, Paid Time Off, and Wellness Program.