Director (Database Engineering – PostgreSQL / Oracle / Couchbase)

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:

As Director in Database Engineering team, you will be leading a highly talented team of Database Engineers specializing in PostgreSQL, Oracle and Couchbase database technologies.

Database Engineering team is part of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) group under Operations and Infrastructure (O&I) division, which delivers operationally excellent open system database infrastructure and services both on premise (private cloud) and in public cloud.  We design, engineer and build reliable, scalable, secure, highly available and cost-effective database infrastructure solutions for our product development partners. The team also provides Level-3 database support for any operational issues and serves as the next level escalation for Database Reliability Engineering team.

The Work itself:

The work involves leading teams adhering to Visa’s leadership principles of leading courageously, obsessing about our customers, collaborating with other teams, and excelling in execution.

As technology owner of multiple database technologies, you will also be responsible to strategize, advance, and engineer enterprise database platform solutions for automated build-patching and efficient administration that meet security, availability, performance, fast delivery and reporting requirements, and to support projects and products using these technologies.

This role is expected to collaborate closely with Product development and other partners in Operations and Infrastructure like Compute, Storage, Network and Middleware Engineering teams. There will be significant integration with our CyberSecurity services, requiring close partnership with them.

Essential Functions

• Lead a global team of Database Engineers specializing in PostgreSQL, Oracle and Couchbase database technologies

• Provides strategic vision for offering cost effective database solutions, optimizing database footprint and enabling product development teams with faster access to database services.

• Lead technical discussions and communicate regularly with senior leadership on technical issues, program status, and escalations.

• Act as a technical liaison between database vendors and various teams within Visa e.g. product development, database reliability engineering.

• Provides framework and expertise for presenting technical solutions, capabilities, and features to stakeholders demonstrating how solutions will support business strategy.

• Work closely with cross-functional groups including product development, other Infrastructure engineering teams, Cybersecurity and Operations.

• Mentor team members in skill development and career growth. Motivate them to push the boundaries and challenge status quo.

• Foster a team culture of trust, collaboration, accountability and integrity.

• Lead by example, demonstrating accountability, and by contributing to departmental procedures, best practices, and standards.

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 

• Technical Expertise: Strong technical expertise to drive the architecture and high-level design of different database topologies and services. 

• Builder: Experience building and deploying database services with quality and scalability.

• Learner: Constant drive to learn new database technologies, automation frameworks and hosting platform. 

• Partnership: Experience collaborating with Database vendors, Project management, Product development, Infra engineering teams, CyberSecurity and Operations teams.

• Challenge the Status Quo: Comfort in pushing the boundaries, hacking beyond traditional solutions & utilizing GenAI to drive efficiency and innovation

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

Basic Qualifications

• 10 years of relevant work experience with a bachelor’s degree -or- 8 years of relevant work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g., Masters-MBA)

Preferred Qualifications

• Minimum 13+ years’ relevant work experience with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or related field.
• 10 years of experience in database engineering and architecture with 5 years of experience in leadership roles.
• Strong understanding of RDBMS, NoSQL and Distributed SQL database concepts and Architecture.
• Strong understanding of various data models e.g. relational, document, key-value, graph
• Strong understanding of database physical and logical replications and various high availability solutions.
• Experience with public cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure and Infrastructure as code (IAC)
• UNIX-Linux platform skills and understanding of operating system, network, storage and security.
• Understanding and experience with Virtualization and Containerization technologies and cloud-native Architecture
• Exceptional collaboration and partnership skills with the ability to work in a global environment and drive consensus in cross-functional teams.
• Proven record of defining technology roadmap, executing defined technology strategies, and driving adoption across a large enterprise

Additional Information

• Travel Requirements: This position requires travel 5-10% of the time.
• Mental and 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 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.