Chief SW Engineer

Visa•Austin, TX

4d•$195,800 - $313,500•Hybrid

About The Position

Visa is a global payments technology company operating at massive scale across more than 200 countries and territories, with CMS serving as a strategic growth area focused on commercial payments and money movement solutions. Visa is seeking a highly technical, hands-on Chief Software Engineer to help lead the next generation of AI-enabled commercial payments and money movement platforms within Commercial and Money Movement Solutions (CMS). This leader will architect and build large-scale cloud-native systems, drive technical direction across teams, and apply GenAI to both product innovation and engineering productivity.

Requirements

12+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 9 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 6 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 15+ years of relevant work experience.
12+ years of software engineering experience, including deep hands-on experience building large-scale backend or platform systems.
Proven expertise in distributed systems design, cloud-native architecture, and highly scalable service development.
Strong experience building production-grade platforms and services rather than only designing them at a conceptual level.
Demonstrated hands-on experience with GenAI, including AI-native applications, workflow orchestration, intelligent automation, or agent-based systems.
Strong understanding of modern service architectures, including microservices, APIs, containers, caching, security, and platform integration patterns.
Ability to influence technical direction across teams while remaining close to implementation and execution.
Experience using AI to improve engineering productivity, product capabilities, or platform intelligence.
Strong engineering judgment across reliability, latency, scale, maintainability, and security.
Experience with Java and modern backend frameworks such as Spring; however, strong system-building expertise is more important than any single programming language.
Experience with REST, gRPC, shared services, container technologies, API gateways, DevOps, observability, and infrastructure automation.

Nice To Haves

15 or more years of experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or 12 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, or MD), PhD with 9+ years of experience
Background in payments, fintech, money movement, or other high-scale transaction environments is a plus.
Experience working in environments where compliance, security, and global scale are critical.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture, design, and development of highly scalable, secure, API-centric distributed systems supporting B2B payables, commercial solutions, and money movement products.
Remain hands-on in building core platform components, services, and engineering patterns rather than operating solely at the strategy layer.
Drive technical leadership across teams by establishing software development standards, reusable frameworks, integration patterns, and platform best practices.
Partner closely with product, architecture, and engineering leaders to shape the technical roadmap for next-generation CMS solutions.
Build and evolve cloud-native services with strong emphasis on scalability, resilience, observability, security, and maintainability.
Lead the adoption of GenAI capabilities across the organization, including AI-native product functionality, intelligent automation, and developer productivity use cases.
Design and implement agentic and workflow-driven systems that leverage modern AI capabilities in practical, production-ready environments.
Mentor senior engineers and help raise the technical bar across the organization through design leadership, code quality, and engineering excellence.
Influence enterprise-level technology choices, deployment patterns, and platform strategy in alignment with Visa engineering principles.