Director of Data Engineering

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.

Visa’s Technology Organization is a community of problem solvers and innovators reshaping the future of commerce. We operate the world’s most sophisticated processing networks capable of handling more than 65k secure transactions a second across 80M merchants, 15k Financial Institutions, and billions of everyday people. While working with us you’ll get to work on complex distributed systems and solve massive scale problems centered on new payment flows, business and data solutions, cyber security, and B2C platforms.     

The Opportunity: 

You will be part of the Value Added Services – Digital Marketing & Engagement organization and will provide technical leadership and oversight to software architects and engineers, while partnering with your product partners on large and complex projects for Customer Engagement, Loyalty, and Marketing domains.

If you’re passionate about engineering excellence, building high‑performing teams, and solving complex distributed systems challenges, this is an opportunity to make a meaningful global impact.

What You Will Do:

Leadership & Management:

• Hire, retain, and develop high‑performing, diverse engineering teams focused on real‑time, mission‑critical transaction systems.
• Build a culture of technical excellence, accountability, ownership, and continuous learning.
• Invest in the career development of engineers and technical leads through mentorship, coaching, and structured growth plans.
• Lead with a client‑first mentality, ensuring platform stability and performance for internal and external customers.

Technical Leadership:

• Provide strong technical direction across distributed systems, microservices, high‑throughput transaction processing, and fault‑tolerant architectures.
• Drive architectural decisions for core components of the Loyalty platform, ensuring ultra‑low latency, high availability, and global scalability.
• Establish engineering best practices through hands‑on technical leadership, code reviews, and architectural deep dives.
• Ensure engineering excellence around quality, security, observability, performance engineering, and resiliency.
• Oversee adoption of modern engineering patterns, including event‑driven systems, asynchronous processing, cloud‑native development, and API‑first design.
• Champion modern engineering practices, including the use of generative AI to improve development productivity.
• Foster a culture of experimentation, innovation, and continuous improvement within the engineering organization.

Collaboration & Strategy:

• Partner with Product, Platform Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, and Architecture teams to define and deliver end‑to‑end platform capabilities.
• Drive cross‑team alignment on technical decisions, execution priorities, and long‑term architectural strategy.
• Support strategic initiatives to evolve the Loyalty platform, including global expansion, new transaction types, and emerging integrations.
• Communicate complex technical concepts and risks to senior leadership in a clear, business‑aligned manner.
• Collaborate with Loyalty product teams to define platform vision, capability roadmaps, and integration strategies.

Development & Innovation:

• Deliver products with complex technical interdependencies by collaborating with geographically dispersed teams.
• Develop architectures that are inherently secure, robust, scalable, modular, API-centric, and global.
• Optimize the use of Visa’s Platforms & Solutions.
• Make a positive impact on Visa's Loyalty and Marketing team, fostering innovation and exploring new technologies such as GenAI

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 work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 4 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 13+ years of relevant work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience integrating generative AI into engineering workflows (OpenAI APIs, GitHub Copilot, etc.) to improve productivity and code quality.
• Champion secure SDLC and quality engineering practices.
• Improve engineering efficiency through automation, observability, DevOps tooling, and standardized development frameworks.
• Strong background building and scaling distributed systems or cloud-native platforms.
• Hands-on expertise in Java/Spring, microservices, APIs (REST), and modern frontend frameworks (TypeScript, Angular).

The Skills You Bring:

• Energy and Experience: A growth mindset that is curious and passionate about technologies and enjoys challenging projects on a global scale
• Challenge the Status Quo: Comfort in pushing the boundaries, ‘hacking’ beyond traditional solutions
• Language Expertise: Expertise in one or more general development languages (e.g., Java, C#, C++)
• Builder: Experience building and deploying modern services and web applications with quality and scalability
• Learner: Constant drive to learn new technologies such as Angular, React, Kubernetes, Docker, Generative AI , Distributed System etc.
• Partnership: Experience collaborating with Product, Test, Dev-ops, and Agile/Scrum teams
• Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify complex technical topics for diverse audiences.

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.