Lead SW Engineer

About UsVisa 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 DescriptionJob Summary:The Acceptance Solutions Product Development team is responsible for a portfolio of products that diversify Visa’s revenue, differentiate our network, and deliver value-added solutions across payment rails. As part of Visa’s broader strategy to increase total merchant value, the team develops solutions that address complex and emerging needs for merchants and acquirers, while helping clients navigate the evolving digital commerce landscape with greater flexibility, resilience, and agility.The goal of the Visa Acceptance Platform is to be the world’s most open payment acceptance platform by delivering market-leading, globally relevant, omnichannel acceptance capabilities through open, composable, modular APIs built with Visa-grade resilience, security, maintainability, and scale.We are seeking a hands-on technical leader to provide technical leadership across the teams building Visa’s Processing platform. The ideal candidate brings deep hands-on experience in distributed systems, high-throughput payment processing, transaction lifecycle workflows, event-driven architecture, secure software design, cloud-native platforms, operational resilience, and modern engineering practices. This person will look across multiple engineering mission teams to ensure the platform is architected, integrated, delivered, and operated as a coherent end-to-end capability, while remaining close to day-to-day engineering execution including architecture decisions, design reviews, code reviews, debugging, production readiness, operational troubleshooting, and technical mentoring.The candidate should be comfortable working across payments, transaction lifecycle management, batch and real-time processing, secure integration, cloud-native platforms, AI/ML-enabled engineering practices, and mission-critical production environments.Essential Functions:Serve as the hands-on technical lead across the teams building the platform within Visa Acceptance, providing technical direction across architecture, design, integration, implementation, scalability, resiliency, security, and operational readiness.Design and evolve secure, reliable, and scalable platform capabilities that support core transaction workflows, lifecycle visibility, operational insight, reporting, reconciliation, and business-critical processing at scale.Provide technical leadership across platform services, integration layers, data flows, user experiences, analytics, and cross-team dependencies to ensure teams build toward a consistent end-to-end platform architecture.Remain actively hands-on with architecture, design reviews, code reviews, proof-of-concepts, performance analysis, debugging, technical troubleshooting, and production-readiness decisions on a day-to-day basis.Set technical direction for core platform capabilities, integration patterns, event flows, lifecycle services, reporting APIs, observability, operational controls, and production support in alignment with product, platform, security, user experience, and business objectives.Lead technical design for event correlation, transaction matching, capture-to-clearing handoff, settlement state management, retry handling, dead-letter queues, replay, idempotency, exactly-once processing considerations, batch file movement, and high-throughput data movement.Partner with application, payment platform, data, product, architecture, security, privacy, risk, governance, operations, and partner-integration teams to deliver solutions that meet functional and non-functional requirements, including security, latency, availability, compliance, maintainability, auditability, and operational readiness.Apply AI/ML, Generative AI, automation, and intelligent engineering practices to improve software delivery, platform observability, reconciliation insight, operational troubleshooting, developer productivity, and business outcomes across the platform.Mentor senior engineers and technical leads through design reviews, architecture discussions, hands-on problem solving, technical deep dives, brown bag sessions, and production troubleshooting.Communicate technical strategy, tradeoffs, risks, dependencies, and recommendations clearly to executive leaders, product partners, architecture forums, and engineering teams.Drive engineering improvements that strengthen reliability, performance, observability, maintainability, developer productivity, operational excellence, and production support across core platform capabilities.Influence technical strategy across teams without relying on formal reporting authority, using strong engineering judgment, collaboration, credibility, and hands-on technical depth.Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.QualificationsBasic 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:Specialist: 4 or more years of relevant work experience.15 years of experience with progressive technical leadership responsibilities and broad influence across platforms, products, or engineering organizations.Demonstrated track record as a hands-on technical leader with organization-wide or platform-wide impact.Deep expertise designing, building, and scaling mission-critical distributed systems that require high availability, scalability, resiliency, security, and operational excellence.Proven ability to solve complex technical problems that span multiple domains, systems, teams, and production environments.Experience setting technical direction, influencing architecture and strategy across teams, and aligning technical decisions with product and business objectives.Expert proficiency in modern programming languages, API-first development, system design, software architecture, testing, deployment, debugging, performance tuning, and operational troubleshooting.Mastery of cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, Kubernetes, containerized deployment models, and distributed architecture patterns.Deep experience with event-driven systems, event streaming platforms such as Kafka, and high-throughput data processing.Experience designing platform capabilities for large-scale transactional or operational systems, including reconciliation, reporting, analytics, workflow orchestration, lifecycle management, and business-critical processing.Experience designing and delivering modern web user interfaces, dashboards, or data visualization experiences that support transaction lifecycle visibility, settlement reporting, operational insights, exception management, and data-driven workflows using contemporary frontend technologies and patterns such as React, Angular, TypeScript, micro-frontends, reusable component libraries, accessibility, responsive design, and secure UI integration with APIs.Track record of mentoring senior engineers, influencing technical leaders, and raising engineering standards through hands-on technical guidance.Experience pioneering AI-enabled engineering practices, automation, or developer productivity improvements at team or organizational scale.Deep understanding of payment processing, reconciliation, transaction lifecycle concepts, distributed data flows, and high-scale financial technology platforms.Experience with file transfer protocols such as SFTP and batch processing patterns used in enterprise payment or data-processing environments.Experience in payments, financial services, fintech, or high-scale transaction processing environments, including familiarity with clearing and settlement concepts and payment network protocols such as Visa, Mastercard, and Amex.Recognized expertise in distributed systems, payment processing, transaction platforms, event-driven architecture, data platforms, secure software architecture, or production operations through publications, speaking engagements, patents, standards contributions, or equivalent industry impact.Experience implementing, deploying, or governing AI/ML, Generative AI, or intelligent systems at scale in production environments or engineering workflows.Track record of building, evolving, or technically leading platforms that serve billions of transactions or very high-volume operational workloads.Experience working with executive leadership, architects, product leaders, security leaders, and engineering teams to define technical strategy, roadmaps, risks, tradeoffs, and investment priorities.History of developing engineers who have grown into senior technical roles through mentorship, design leadership, technical reviews, and hands-on coaching.Experience with PCI-DSS, SOX, financial services regulatory compliance, security standards, audit readiness, and operational control environments.Experience with event correlation, transaction matching, retry mechanisms, dead-letter queues, event replay, idempotency, exactly-once processing considerations, and distributed data consistency patterns.Experience with modern frontend architecture, including React or Angular, TypeScript, design systems, reusable component libraries, performance optimization, accessibility standards, secure API integration, and data visualization frameworks for transaction lifecycle visibility, settlement reporting, reconciliation, exception management, and operational insight use cases.Strong hands-on background with technologies such as Java/J2EE, REST, Kafka, event streaming, batch processing, SFTP, data platforms, modern UI frameworks, TypeScript or JavaScript, CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, test automation, and production troubleshooting.Excellent problem-solving, analytical, communication, and influencing skills, with the ability to form, advocate, and communicate an independent technical viewpoint grounded in hands-on engineering experience.Information for US ApplicantsFor roles located in the US, the estimated salary range for this position is $192,300.00 to $ 307,600.00 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.Work HoursVaries upon the needs of the department.Travel RequirementsThis position requires travel 5-10% of the time.Mental/Physical RequirementsThis 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 EmployerQualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protect veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.SummaryLocation: US - Foster City, CAType: Full time