Director, Strategic Project Management

The Strategic Projects and Planning, China team leads and coordinates enterprise-wide initiatives that are critical to Visa's long-term success in China.

This role will manage assigned projects within Visa's China Market Entry agenda, including vendor/partner coordination, technology delivery, systems integration, regulatory-readiness activities, launch preparation and transition to ongoing operations.

Key Responsibilities:

• Manage assigned projects or project workstreams using clear scope, milestones, actions and delivery dates.
• Develop and maintain project plans, schedules, status reports, decision logs, risk and issue logs, and other core project documentation.
• Coordinate day-to-day activities across payment product, application engineering, architecture, integration, infrastructure, cybersecurity, operations, control functions and external processing partners.
• Track deliverables and dependencies, follow up with owners and escalate overdue or blocked items through the appropriate channels.
• Organize project meetings, prepare materials, document decisions and actions, and monitor completion of follow-up items.
• Support requirements clarification, solution planning, integration, testing, certification, deployment and launch-readiness activities for card-processing, wallet-processing and payment-platform projects.
• Assist with partner coordination by maintaining agreed deliverables, acceptance criteria, schedules, action items and issue tracking.
• Prepare concise project updates for management, highlighting progress, upcoming milestones, risks, issues and decisions needed.
• Coordinate project inputs for regulatory, legal, compliance, cybersecurity, data, operational risk, audit and control reviews.
• Support business continuity, disaster recovery, operational-readiness and third-party dependency activities relevant to assigned projects.
• Support cutover planning, implementation tracking, post-launch stabilization and transition of completed deliverables to operational teams.
• Maintain effective working relationships with internal and external stakeholders and contribute to a collaborative project environment.

Qualifications:

• 12+ years of experience in technology project management, application delivery, systems integration or engineering within the payments industry, including experience coordinating cross-functional technology projects.
• Experience working with domestic bank card clearing institutions in China to drive technical implementation and establish operational processes for domestic card-processing services, including systems integration, testing and certification, defining operational responsibilities and procedures, and supporting regulatory readiness and launch.
• Practical experience managing project plans, schedules, milestones, risks, issues, dependencies, actions and status reporting.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, information systems, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Working knowledge of project-management methods and tools, with the ability to organize work, follow up on commitments and maintain accurate documentation.
• Ability to understand payment-processing business and technical requirements, challenge assumptions, identify integration dependencies, and translate requirements into clear project activities, owners and target dates.
• Experience coordinating internal stakeholders, vendors or business partners.
• Strong understanding of payment message flows and interfaces, including ISO 8583 and ISO 20022, and the ability to review message specifications, field or data-element mappings, transaction states, response codes and integration-test scenarios.
• Deep knowledge of bank-card processing across authorization, clearing, settlement, reconciliation, exception handling and dispute-related processing, with a strong understanding of issuer, acquirer, merchant, processor and network interactions.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills in English, with the ability to prepare concise updates and communicate with stakeholders at different levels.
• Ability to work effectively in a matrixed environment, manage multiple priorities and escalate issues appropriately.