Director, Software Engineering

Visa•Bellevue, WA

3d•$186,800 - $299,200•Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

10+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelors degree, OR 13+ years of relevant work experience.
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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.