Description
Visa is seeking a Senior Director of Software Engineering to lead engineering for key capabilities within the Risk and Security Solutions (RAS) organization. This is a deeply technical role for an AI-forward engineering leader who combines organizational leadership with strong hands-on software engineering, architecture and delivery ownership.
You will lead a high-performing team of engineers and AI agents responsible for building and operating high-scale, mission-critical, distributed systems that power customer-facing risk and security products. You will be expected to go beyond directional leadership: this role requires an AI-forward leader who can personally engage in architecture, design, code reviews, technical problem solving, production issue resolution, and where necessary hands-on code contribution to accelerate delivery, unblock teams, and raise the engineering bar.
Responsibilities:
- Own the technical architecture, design, implementation, and delivery of customer-facing Risk & Security products and platform capabilities.
- Translate product strategy into scalable, secure, resilient, and operable distributed systems.
- Actively participate in code, design and architecture reviews, root-cause analysis, and contribute code when needed to unblock teams or accelerate critical initiatives.
- Establish and enforce engineering standards for agentic development lifecycle, context engineering, code quality evals, performance, scalability, availability, observability, maintainability, and secure software delivery.
- Partner with Product Management, Cybersecurity, SRE/Operations to deliver solutions that maximize customer value, platform health, and execution predictability.
- Build and execute technology roadmaps that balance business priorities, engineering sustainability, technical debt reduction, and operational efficiency.
- Drive adoption of engineering best practices including CI/CD, test automation and telemetry.
- Communicate technical strategy, execution status, key tradeoffs, risks, and architectural decisions clearly to senior leadership.
- Attract, retain and grow high-performing engineering talent.
- Enable technical and process innovation through thought leadership and influence.
- Understand current and future trends within the payments industry.
Requirements:
- 18+ years of relevant work experience with a bachelor’s degree or with an Advanced degree
- Led a team of 40+ made up of full-time employees, contractors and AI agents.
- Proven hands-on technical leadership by actively participating in code and design reviews.
- Built a culture of engineering excellence (context engineering, code quality evals, security, performance, scalability, availability, resilience etc.)
- Effectively managed complex technical interdependencies across geographical teams.
- Partnered with product management in developing a strategy and roadmap that align with business and engineering goals.
- Partnered with remote teams to ensure alignment across product development. Bring a global mindset.
- Demonstrated ability to hire, coach, retain, and develop high-performing engineers and engineering leaders while raising the overall technical bar of the organization.
- Enabled innovation through thought leadership and influence.
- Deep expertise in building and operating high-scale distributed systems with demanding requirements for latency, throughput, resilience, security, and availability.
- Strong architectural judgment across service decomposition, API design, asynchronous messaging, data consistency, caching, failure isolation, and recovery strategies.
- Excellent execution leadership with the ability to align teams, prioritize effectively, manage risk, and deliver against commitments in ambiguous or high-pressure environments.
- Strong cross-functional partnership skills with the ability to influence Product, Operations, and senior stakeholders through technical credibility and data-driven communication.