Director, Software Engineering

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 are the engineers responsible for a portfolio of products that drive diversification of Visa revenue, differentiate our network, and deliver value-added solutions across other rails. This is part of a strategy to increase total merchant value by developing solutions that address complex and emerging needs of both merchants and acquirers. Our mission is to drive the future of payment acceptance, helping our clients navigate digital commerce complexities and address an increasing need for flexibility and agility. The goal of the Visa Acceptance Platform is to be the world’s most open payment platform by delivering market leading, globally relevant, omnichannel acceptance componentry through open, composable, modular APIs delivered with Visa-grade resilience, security, maintenance, and scale. We are seeking a dynamic, hands-on engineering leader to lead teams building secure, high-performing distributed systems for payment acceptance. Our technology stack includes Java, Containers, Kafka, relational databases, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern cloud-native engineering practices. The ideal candidate brings strong software engineering depth, proven people leadership, and the ability to stay close to day-to-day design, code, architecture, delivery, and operational decisions while partnering with architecture, product, security, and operations teams to deliver resilient platforms at scale.This role requires a leader who can balance strategic direction with active hands-on engineering involvement, apply AI/ML and Generative AI to improve engineering productivity and business outcomes, and mentor engineers to grow their technical capabilities and careers. This is an opportunity to lead talented teams while remaining deeply engaged in the technical details that shape secure, scalable payment acceptance. Be a part of our mission to shape the future of secure payments.Essential Functions:Lead the design, implementation, and deployment of secure, reliable, robust, and interoperable payment acceptance products.Remain hands-on with architecture, design reviews, code reviews, technical troubleshooting, production readiness, and critical delivery decisions on a day-to-day basis.Provide engineering leadership to ensure solutions align with platform principles, architecture standards, and Visa-grade availability, resiliency, and operational excellence expectations.Define and execute the technical strategy for payment processing and acceptance platforms in alignment with product vision, business priorities, and long-term platform evolution.Drive delivery of fit-for-purpose products and platform capabilities that improve time-to-market while maintaining security, quality, scalability, and reliability.Apply AI/ML, Generative AI, and automation to improve productivity across the software development lifecycle and enable innovative business and product outcomes.Establish and continuously improve engineering best practices for application development, testing, deployment, observability, monitoring, incident response, and operational readiness.Partner with security, privacy, risk, governance, and compliance teams to ensure products meet applicable policies, standards, regulatory expectations, and customer commitments.Collaborate with product, regional, business, and client-facing stakeholders to translate requirements into high-quality solutions that meet functional and non-functional requirements.Communicate technical strategy, tradeoffs, risks, dependencies, and delivery progress clearly to executive leadership, business partners, and engineering teams.Coach, mentor, and develop engineers and engineering leaders through regular feedback, technical reviews, brown bag sessions, tech talks, and career development conversations.Build and lead high-performing teams by promoting collaboration, constructive debate, accountability, inclusion, and execution excellence consistent with Visa Leadership Principles.Adapt communications and presentations for a wide range of audiences, including updates on strategy, planning, delivery, innovation, organizational effectiveness, and business results.Bring forward new ideas, engineering improvements, and technology recommendations that increase team effectiveness, improve developer productivity, and advance platform capabilities.This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in the office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.Essential Functions:Serve as the hands-on technical lead for Payment Processing Platform across the Visa Acceptance Platform, providing technical direction across architecture, design, implementation, scalability, resiliency, and operational readiness.Design and evolve secure, reliable, and scalable search, indexing, analytics, enrichment, and data-processing capabilities that support high-volume payment acceptance use cases.Provide technical leadership for modern, intuitive, secure, and performant user interfaces that enable search, analytics, reporting, operational insights, and data-driven workflows for internal and external users.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 event-driven data flows, transaction enrichment, search indexing, analytics pipelines, user-facing dashboards, observability, and operational insights in alignment with product, platform, security, user experience, and business objectives.Lead technical design for event correlation, transaction matching, retry handling, dead-letter queues, replay, idempotency, exactly-once processing considerations, and high-throughput data movement.Partner with application, data, platform, product, security, privacy, risk, governance, and operations teams to deliver solutions that meet functional and non-functional requirements, including security, latency, availability, compliance, and maintainability.Apply AI/ML, Generative AI, automation, and intelligent engineering practices to improve software delivery, search relevance, analytics capabilities, operational insight, developer productivity, and business outcomes.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, and operational excellence across Search and Analytics 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 and a Bachelors degree, OR 13+ years of relevant work experience.Preferred Qualifications:12 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or 8-10 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 6+ years of work experience with a PhD.Demonstrated experience leading software engineering teams, including people management, coaching, performance development, and delivery accountability.Deep experience designing, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems that require high availability, scalability, resiliency, and security.Proven ability to solve complex technical and organizational problems across multiple domains, systems, and teams.Experience setting technical direction, influencing architecture and delivery strategy, and aligning engineering execution with product and business objectives.Strong proficiency in modern software engineering practices, programming languages, API design, system design, testing, deployment, and operational excellence.Recent hands-on experience with architecture, design, coding practices, code reviews, debugging, production support, and technical decision-making in complex software systems.Experience with cloud platforms, Kubernetes, containerized deployment models, and modern DevOps practices.Experience with event-driven architecture, streaming platforms such as Kafka, and high-throughput transaction or data processing systems.Experience delivering secure software platforms, including familiarity with authentication, authorization, encryption, identity, and secure engineering practices.Track record of mentoring engineers, developing technical leaders, and building strong engineering culture.Experience applying AI-enabled engineering practices, automation, or developer productivity improvements across software delivery teams.Experience with payment processing, transaction lifecycle concepts, or high-scale financial technology platforms.Experience in payments, financial services, fintech, or high-scale transaction processing environments, including familiarity with payment network protocols and acceptance workflows.Experience designing and operating globally distributed, mission-critical platforms that support very high transaction volumes and strict availability, latency, security, and compliance requirements.Experience implementing, deploying, or governing AI/ML, Generative AI, or agentic AI capabilities in production environments or engineering workflows.Strong hands-on background in API-first software product development using technologies such as Java/J2EE, Spring Boot, Vert.x, REST, Kafka, Hazelcast, Git, Maven, CI/CD pipelines, and test automation.Experience with resilient event-driven architecture patterns, including event correlation, transaction matching, retry mechanisms, dead-letter queues, replay, idempotency, and exactly-once processing considerations.Experience partnering with executive leadership, product leaders, technical product managers, regional teams, and business stakeholders to define strategy, roadmaps, requirements, priorities, and delivery plans.Demonstrated success leading high-performing, multi-disciplinary, and geographically distributed engineering teams, including hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical talent.Experience with financial services compliance, risk, and control requirements such as PCI-DSS, SOX, security standards, audit readiness, and operational controls.Strong experience with agile delivery, software development lifecycle practices, engineering metrics, continuous improvement, developer productivity, and operational performance management.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.Long-term strategic thinker who stays current with emerging technologies and translates them into practical engineering and business outcomes.Highly driven, resourceful, results-oriented, and collaborative, with strong communication skills and a focus on durable, win-win outcomes.Information for US ApplicantsFor roles located in the US, the estimated salary range for this position is $219,100.00 to $ 350,800.00 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.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