Sr. Director of Software Engineering

Visa is a world leader in payments and technology, with over 259 billion payments transactions flowing safely between consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government entities in more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable, and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive while driven by a common purpose – to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

Make an impact with a purpose-driven industry leader. Join us today and experience Life at Visa.

We are seeking a candidate with demonstrated ability to lead by influence with a record of successfully delivering modern, large-scale, complex services and products. This is accomplished by leading multiple large diverse technical teams at all levels and closely collaborate with program and product teams.

Your mission is to provide hands-on leadership to multiple development teams, building a world-class team of engineers. The focus is on defining, executing, and delivering functional and non-functional 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 multiple teams, matching them with appropriate technology and business problems while building a culture of both innovation and drive for excellence.

The successful candidate will be comfortable navigating the challenging dynamic payments space and leading global teams responsible for platform transformation efforts.

Essential Functions: 

Directs and manages multiple diverse teams of engineering professionals performing research, development, design and/or implementation of products, services, solutions for Visa acceptance platform and the VISA VAS (Value-Added Services) Portfolio. Responsible for creating and communicating technical strategy within the organization and/or across the function. Own and drive the end to end development effort for on-time, high quality, highly scalable technical solutions that meet the product vision. Responsibilities span all phases of product development including:

• Collaborate and align with architects and senior technologists on proper architecture and design.

• Progress our modernization and AI roadmap, enabling us to expand our market reach and client base by adopting best-in-class technology solutions for our core platform.

• Partner with Business teams to ensure completeness and common understanding of product vision, roadmap and requirements.

• Build a culture of engineering excellence (quality, security, performance, scalability, availability, resilience etc.) across your own teams and the entire organization.

• Adopt AI in all aspects of the software development lifecycle.

• Influence adoption of best engineering practices, automations of software development, testing and deployment processes.

• Manage technical debt and costs within your product and organization budgets.

• Be responsible for the incident management, change, and problem management.

• Hire, retain and grow high-performing and diverse global engineering teams.

• Invest in the career development of your employees with a strong focus on mentorship and training.

• Lead with a strong client focus mindset across organizations.

• Handle routine daily activities such as coordination, coaching, mentoring, recruiting, budgeting, planning, delivery, quality, partner relationships, performance metrics, operations, efficiency, service level management, etc.

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

Basic Qualifications:

• 12+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 9 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 6 years of work experience with a PhD, 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
• Proven experience managing software development teams delivering highly available enterprise level, distributed applications utilizing technologies such as C#, Java, TypeScript, React, Kubernetes.
• Extensive experience is applied AI/ML, modeling, data analysis and shipping AI powered features.
• Outstanding verbal, written, presentation, facilitation, and interaction skills, along with effective communication (both written and verbal) skills and the ability to present complex ideas in a clear, concise way.
• Proven track record of coordinating multiple product and technical teams by removing roadblocks and solving complex problems collaboratively.
• Strong at technical goal setting for a project with actionable success metrics.
• Experience with measuring a service from user experience perspective, setting, and tracking to SLAs and KPIs.
• Ability to represent technical and business issues and solutions to multiple levels internally and externally to support organizational plans.
• Ability to work in a complex organization to determine business and customer needs, providing the best solution to meet those needs.
• Experience with Agile methodologies and software development lifecycle principles.
• Ability to manage multiple competing top priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience building microservices with HTTP, REST, JSON and XML.
• Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Payment industry experience is a strong plus.

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 a new hire into this position is 206,100.00 to 322,150.00 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.