Applications Program Analyst

Visa•Foster City, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

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: We are seeking a versatile, curious, and impact‑driven Applications Program Analyst who thrives at the intersection of AI, distributed systems, and large‑scale customer impact solving complex challenges on a global scale. In this role, you will be an integral part of a multi-functional development team leading the execution of next‑generation AI‑powered solutions, partnering closely with engineering, data science, design, security, and business stakeholders. You will steward development from ideation to scaled deployment, guiding teams to build intelligent, resilient, and trustworthy systems that serve Visa’s global network. While building components of powerful payment technology, you will get to see your efforts shaping the digital future of monetary transactions. The Work itself: Lead the experimentation pipeline, evaluating new technologies, model types, LLM‑based features, and platform capabilities—and guiding teams through proof‑of‑concepts, pilots, and scaled launches. Shape Visa’s next‑generation AI ecosystem, leveraging cloud‑native and modern AI/ML technologies to build robust, privacy‑preserving, and globally scalable services. Implement innovations for AI‑native capabilities that touch 40% of the world’s population, setting new standards for scalability, security, explainability, and reusability. Translate complex business challenges into clear engineering roadmaps, user requirements, and technical specifications that enable breakthrough innovation across payment flows, fraud intelligence, data products, and real‑time commerce platforms. Drive cross‑functional collaboration, ensuring model developers, platform engineers, UX teams, and product partners align on architecture, capabilities, and success metrics. Champion product quality and operational resilience, identifying systemic patterns across data, model performance, bugs, and user friction—and driving durable solutions. Enable global impact, mentoring teams, developing best practices, and contributing to internal learning programs to elevate Visa’s AI maturity and experimentation culture.

Requirements

5 or more years of relevant work experience with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.
Self-driven and willing to work across technologies/languages.
Expert-level skills in Python and/or NodeJS with skills in Java or C/C++ is a bonus.
Experience in building Generative AI applications, conversational AI, RAG and Multi-Agentic architectures, techniques and libraries.
In-depth understanding of NLP including tokenization, word embeddings, and basic sequence models.
Ability to design and implement AI components and integrate them into larger systems.
Familiarity with common robustness issues in AI systems.
Familiarity with deep learning basics, including neural network architectures and training procedures.
Proficiency in front-end web development technologies like ReactJS/Angular/NodeJS.
Demonstrated proficiency in troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, application design, and implementing large components for enterprise projects.
Language Expertise: Expertise in one or more general development languages (e.g., Python, NodeJS, Java, C#, C++)
Energy and Experience: A growth mindset that is curious and passionate about technologies and enjoys challenging projects on a global scale
Challenge the Status Quo: Comfort in pushing the boundaries, ‘hacking’ beyond traditional solutions
Builder: Experience building and deploying modern services and web applications with quality and scalability
Learner: Constant drive to learn new technologies such as Angular, React, Kubernetes, Docker, etc.
Partnership: Experience collaborating with Product, Test, Dev-ops, and Agile/Scrum teams

Nice To Haves

2 years or more with an Advanced Degree (Masters/PhD in Computer Science)
Proficiency in implementing and fine-tuning AI models using popular frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn)
Exposure to leading-edge areas such as Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Stream Computing and MLOps.
Ability to work with large datasets and perform exploratory data analysis.
Experience with data preprocessing, feature engineering, and model evaluation techniques
Understanding enterprise security, certificate management, etc.
Hands-on experience with Jenkins and container deployment architecture.
Experience using OAuth2.0, SSO, and authentication methods/protocols.
Expertise in application security, SSDLC, and knowledge of cryptography fundamentals.
Experience in the payments tech industry is a plus.

Responsibilities

Lead the experimentation pipeline, evaluating new technologies, model types, LLM‑based features, and platform capabilities—and guiding teams through proof‑of‑concepts, pilots, and scaled launches.
Shape Visa’s next‑generation AI ecosystem, leveraging cloud‑native and modern AI/ML technologies to build robust, privacy‑preserving, and globally scalable services.
Implement innovations for AI‑native capabilities that touch 40% of the world’s population, setting new standards for scalability, security, explainability, and reusability.
Translate complex business challenges into clear engineering roadmaps, user requirements, and technical specifications that enable breakthrough innovation across payment flows, fraud intelligence, data products, and real‑time commerce platforms.
Drive cross‑functional collaboration, ensuring model developers, platform engineers, UX teams, and product partners align on architecture, capabilities, and success metrics.
Champion product quality and operational resilience, identifying systemic patterns across data, model performance, bugs, and user friction—and driving durable solutions.
Enable global impact, mentoring teams, developing best practices, and contributing to internal learning programs to elevate Visa’s AI maturity and experimentation culture.
Write code to fulfill ideation of technical requirements to create functional prototypes by applying one of general programming languages (e.g. Python, NodeJS, Java)
Provide technical leadership across AI, data platforms, and large‑scale distributed systems - directing strategy for how requirements are collected, evaluated, and transform into decisive product direction to guide product engineers.
Lead structured discovery with product, engineering, and business stakeholders to recommend architectures, model integration patterns, and scalable design strategies.
Establish and maintain standards for responsible AI, including data quality, model testing, explainability, observability, and end‑to-end governance.
Lead planning and implementation for new AI capabilities and intelligent features, ensuring seamless integration into Visa’s global platforms and customer experiences.
Analyze customer signals, performance patterns, and model behavior to implement systemic improvements and long‑term product enhancements.
Demonstrates technical working knowledge to understand requirements.
Identifies and contributes to the development and solution strategies to team members that improve the design and functionality of interface features across one or more project features, under minimal guidance.
Collaborates with others to support the piloting of new technology capabilities and features that enhance the user experience across e-commerce products.
Analyzes bugs for issues and applies debugging tools to verify assumptions.