Lead Software Engineer

Visa•Austin, TX

10d•$173,100 - $276,800•Hybrid

About The Position

Visa’s Technology Organization is a collaborative community of problem solvers and innovators dedicated to 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 individuals. We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to lead the design and implementation of GenAI-powered, autonomous engineering agents that operate across our identity, access management, and security platforms. You will apply deep expertise in Python, LLMs, and cloud-native distributed systems to build intelligent services that automate complex workflows such as access reviews, policy analysis, incident triage, and developer productivity. In this role, you’ll sit at the intersection of GenAI, security/IAM, and platform engineering: designing agentic systems that are safe, auditable, and scalable, and partnering with product, IAM, and security teams to turn them into production platforms used by thousands of engineers and millions of users.

Requirements

10+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 7 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 4 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 13+ years of relevant work experience.
8+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3 years building cloud-native backend systems (microservices, event-driven architectures) in production.
Strong proficiency in Python for backend services and automation, including experience building APIs, background jobs, and data/ML workflows.
Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications (e.g., chatbots, copilots, assistants, RAG systems, or autonomous agents) that have been deployed to production or used by real users.
Experience with at least one agentic/LLM orchestration framework (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, custom tool-calling frameworks) and vector search / retrieval (e.g., pgvector, OpenSearch, Pinecone, Weaviate).
Solid understanding of identity and access management or security concepts: OAuth2/OIDC, SSO, tokens, access reviews, RBAC, or security incident workflows.
Strong background in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure), containers (Docker), and orchestrators (Kubernetes), plus modern CI/CD.
Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives end-to-end: aligning stakeholders, making architectural trade-offs, and mentoring other engineers.

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
Prior experience building solutions in or adjacent to IAM / security: e.g., working on authentication services, access management, security platforms, or compliance tooling.
Experience integrating GenAI systems with security and governance guardrails (policy checks, approval flows, audit logs, PII controls).
Familiarity with Java or Go in addition to Python, and with modern API design (REST, gRPC, GraphQL).
Background in observability and reliability: SLO design, log and metrics pipelines, alerting, and incident response.
Experience in a high-scale or regulated environment (financial services, fintech, payments, or security-focused products).
Contributions to open-source GenAI/agent frameworks or internal AI platforms.

Responsibilities

Design and build GenAI agent systems that automate high-value workflows in identity and security (e.g., access certification, entitlement review, log and alert triage, policy analysis, IAM change reviews).
Develop Python-based services and tools that orchestrate LLMs, tools, and APIs (e.g., ticketing, IAM platforms, logging systems, CMDB, CI/CD) into reliable, auditable autonomous workflows.
Implement RAG pipelines and context-management layers for agents, integrating with internal data sources (logs, IAM stores, config, code repos, wikis) to provide accurate, traceable responses.
Partner with IAM and security teams to integrate agents with existing authentication and authorization systems (OAuth2/OIDC, SSO, RBAC), ensuring strong controls, approvals, and guardrails.
Own end-to-end productionization of GenAI solutions: evaluation, safety guardrails, observability, rollback strategies, and continuous improvement based on user feedback and metrics.
Architect and operate cloud-native backends (microservices, event pipelines, APIs) on AWS or other cloud platforms, with strong SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, and incident response practices.
Collaborate with staff engineers and architects across IAM, security, and core platforms to define patterns and reference architectures for GenAI and agentic systems across the organization.
Mentor other engineers in Python, GenAI, and secure agent design, and help shape the technical roadmap and best practices for AI-enabled engineering at the company.