Lead SW Engineer

Visa•Foster City, CA

3d•$192,300 - $307,600•Hybrid

About The Position

The Acceptance Solutions Product Development team is responsible for a portfolio of products that diversify Visa’s revenue, differentiate our network, and deliver value-added solutions across payment rails. As part of Visa’s broader strategy to increase total merchant value, the team develops solutions that address complex and emerging needs for merchants and acquirers, while helping clients navigate the evolving digital commerce landscape with greater flexibility, resilience, and agility. The goal of the Visa Acceptance Platform is to be the world’s most open payment acceptance platform by delivering market-leading, globally relevant, omnichannel acceptance capabilities through open, composable, modular APIs built with Visa-grade resilience, security, maintainability, and scale. We are seeking a hands-on technical leader to lead the architecture, design, and evolution of Search and Analytics capabilities across the Visa Acceptance Platform. The ideal candidate brings deep hands-on experience in distributed systems, high-throughput data processing, search platforms, analytics pipelines, event-driven architecture, secure software design, and modern user interface technologies. This person will be expected to remain close to day-to-day engineering execution, including architecture decisions, design reviews, code reviews, debugging, production readiness, operational troubleshooting, and technical mentoring across both backend and frontend engineering domains. This role will help shape how Visa Acceptance Platform captures, enriches, indexes, searches, analyzes, secures, visualizes, and operationalizes transaction and platform data at scale. The candidate should be comfortable working across payments, analytics, search, user experience, security, cloud-native platforms, AI/ML-enabled engineering practices, and mission-critical production environments.

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.
Demonstrated track record as a hands-on technical leader with organization-wide or platform-wide impact.
Deep expertise designing, building, and scaling mission-critical distributed systems that require high availability, scalability, resiliency, security, and operational excellence.
Proven ability to solve complex technical problems that span multiple domains, systems, teams, and production environments.
Experience setting technical direction, influencing architecture and strategy across teams, and aligning technical decisions with product and business objectives.
Expert proficiency in modern programming languages, API-first development, system design, software architecture, testing, deployment, debugging, performance tuning, and operational troubleshooting.
Mastery of cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, Kubernetes, containerized deployment models, and distributed architecture patterns.
Deep experience with event-driven systems, event streaming platforms such as Kafka, and high-throughput data processing.
Experience designing search, indexing, analytics, enrichment, or data-processing capabilities for large-scale transactional or operational systems.
Experience designing and delivering modern web user interfaces, dashboards, or data visualization experiences using contemporary frontend technologies and patterns such as React, Angular, TypeScript, micro-frontends, reusable component libraries, accessibility, responsive design, and secure UI integration with APIs.
Track record of mentoring senior engineers, influencing technical leaders, and raising engineering standards through hands-on technical guidance.
Experience pioneering AI-enabled engineering practices, automation, or developer productivity improvements at team or organizational scale.
Deep understanding of payment processing, payment capture, event enrichment, transaction lifecycle concepts, and high-scale financial technology platforms.
Experience with file transfer protocols such as SFTP and batch processing patterns used in enterprise payment or data-processing environments.
Experience in payments, financial services, fintech, or high-scale transaction processing environments, including familiarity with payment network protocols such as Visa, Mastercard, and Amex.
Recognized expertise in distributed systems, search, analytics, data platforms, or secure software architecture through publications, speaking engagements, patents, standards contributions, or equivalent industry impact.
Experience implementing, deploying, or governing AI/ML, Generative AI, or intelligent systems at scale in production environments or engineering workflows.
Track record of building, evolving, or technically leading platforms that serve billions of transactions or very high-volume operational workloads.
Experience working with executive leadership, architects, product leaders, security leaders, and engineering teams to define technical strategy, roadmaps, risks, tradeoffs, and investment priorities.
History of developing engineers who have grown into senior technical roles through mentorship, design leadership, technical reviews, and hands-on coaching.
Experience with PCI-DSS, SOX, financial services regulatory compliance, security standards, audit readiness, and operational control environments.
Experience with event correlation, transaction matching, retry mechanisms, dead-letter queues, event replay, idempotency, exactly-once processing considerations, and distributed data consistency patterns.
Experience with data serialization formats such as Avro, Protobuf, and JSON, and with data contracts or schema evolution in distributed systems.
Experience with modern frontend architecture, including React or Angular, TypeScript, design systems, reusable component libraries, performance optimization, accessibility standards, secure API integration, and data visualization frameworks for search and analytics use cases.
Strong hands-on background with technologies such as Java/J2EE, REST, Kafka, search or analytics platforms, modern UI frameworks, TypeScript or JavaScript, CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, and test automation.
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.

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

Serve as the hands-on technical lead for Payment Processing Platform across the Visa Acceptance Platform, providing technical direction across architecture, design, implementation, scalability, resiliency, and operational readiness.
Design and evolve secure, reliable, and scalable search, indexing, analytics, enrichment, and data-processing capabilities that support high-volume payment acceptance use cases.
Provide technical leadership for modern, intuitive, secure, and performant user interfaces that enable search, analytics, reporting, operational insights, and data-driven workflows for internal and external users.
Remain actively hands-on with architecture, design reviews, code reviews, proof-of-concepts, performance analysis, debugging, technical troubleshooting, and production-readiness decisions on a day-to-day basis.
Set technical direction for event-driven data flows, transaction enrichment, search indexing, analytics pipelines, user-facing dashboards, observability, and operational insights in alignment with product, platform, security, user experience, and business objectives.
Lead technical design for event correlation, transaction matching, retry handling, dead-letter queues, replay, idempotency, exactly-once processing considerations, and high-throughput data movement.
Partner with application, data, platform, product, security, privacy, risk, governance, and operations teams to deliver solutions that meet functional and non-functional requirements, including security, latency, availability, compliance, and maintainability.
Apply AI/ML, Generative AI, automation, and intelligent engineering practices to improve software delivery, search relevance, analytics capabilities, operational insight, developer productivity, and business outcomes.
Mentor senior engineers and technical leads through design reviews, architecture discussions, hands-on problem solving, technical deep dives, brown bag sessions, and production troubleshooting.
Communicate technical strategy, tradeoffs, risks, dependencies, and recommendations clearly to executive leaders, product partners, architecture forums, and engineering teams.
Drive engineering improvements that strengthen reliability, performance, observability, maintainability, developer productivity, and operational excellence across Search and Analytics capabilities.
Influence technical strategy across teams without relying on formal reporting authority, using strong engineering judgment, collaboration, credibility, and hands-on technical depth.