This role blends architecture, leadership, full-stack development, cloud engineering, and GenAI frameworks. As a Visa Lead Engineer, you will be an integral part of a multi-functional development team inventing, designing, building, and testing software products that reach a truly global customer base. While building components of powerful payment technology, you will get to see your efforts shaping the digital future of monetary transactions.
The Work itself
Global Operations holds the responsibility of ensuring Visa’s diverse portfolio of commercial services are performing optimally, meeting stringent availability targets and exceeding our clients’ expectations.
By architecting automation and GenAI into our operational DNA, and deeply embedding AIOps into our strategic foundation, Global Operations, the engine room of production operations, is well positioned to think big, act quickly and innovate with intention.
Working with highly integrated, high-throughput systems, an equally high importance must be placed on robust observability, intelligent event detection and incident management.
Global Operations sets the operational standards to support the business demands of today and the operational needs of tomorrow as technologies continue to evolve and adjust the way we work to support the business.
Through blame free post mortems, intellectual curiosity and problem solving we turn reactive into proactive and create an environment that provides the support and mentorship for our team members to learn and grow.
This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in the office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.
Qualifications
Basic Qualifications
8+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 5 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 2 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 11+ years of relevant work experience.
Preferred Qualifications
9 or more years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor Degree or 7 or more relevant years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 3 or more years of experience with a PhD
Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, AI/ML, or related field.
8+ years of software engineering experience; 2+ years leading or mentoring engineers.
Worked with Agile SDLC process and SAFE agile environment in distributed teams
Hands-on experience with
LLM frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain, Haystack, AWS Bedrock GenAI tools)
Python backend development (FastAPI strongly preferred)
Frontend development (React + TypeScript)
Vector databases (FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, OpenSearch, etc.)
Agile Frameworks like SAFE, GitHub / Bitbucket, Jira, ServiceNow, Wiki, CI/CD automation pipelines involving Jenkins
Proven experience shipping products on AWS (Lambda, ECS/EKS, S3, API Gateway, Bedrock, SageMaker).
Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and API design.
Experience implementing RAG at scale using internal or cloud-based vector stores.
Experience with Databricks/Spark pipelines, MLFlow, or modern MLOps tools.
Familiarity with event-driven messaging systems (Kafka, Kinesis).
Background in payments, risk, fraud analytics, or regulated financial systems.
Experience creating developer tooling or reusable frameworks for broader engineering teams.
The Skills You Bring
GenAI Architecture & Framework Development
Architect and deliver GenAI-enabled applications leveraging
LangGraph, LangChain, Haystack, or similar agent frameworks
AWS GenAI services (Bedrock, SageMaker, “Strands”-style agent pipelines, embeddings, vector stores)
RAG architectures, custom LLM orchestration, model evaluation, LLMOps workflows
Build reusable GenAI components, SDKs, pipelines, and abstraction layers for engineering teams.
Define best practices for
Prompt engineering and evaluation
LLM safety, guardrails, and content filtering
Embedding generation and vector database integrations
Model lifecycle governance and deployment optimization
Full‑Stack Engineering (Hands-on Development)
Develop end‑to‑end AI applications using
Backend: Python, FastAPI, Flask, Node.js
Frontend: React + TypeScript, UI component frameworks, REST/GraphQL integration
Build secure APIs, microservices, event-driven components, and backend integrations for AI systems.
Design intuitive, responsive, production-grade user interfaces for GenAI-powered tools.
Data Pipelines & CI/CD Engineering
Design and build data workflows supporting AI systems, including
ETL/ELT pipelines
Data preparation for LLM training/fine-tuning
Embedding pipelines and retrieval data stores
Implement CI/CD automation leveraging
Jenkins, GitHub/Bitbucket, Jira, Wiki, GitHub Actions, CodePipeline, Artifactory or similar systems
Automated testing, containerization, deployment, quality gates
Infrastructure-as-code (CloudFormation, Terraform)
Ensure automated monitoring, logging, observability, and rollback strategies.
Governance, Security & Responsible AI
Apply Visa’s standards for
Model explainability
Data governance and redaction
Security boundaries, access control, encryption
Responsible AI guidelines and compliance expectations
Work with cybersecurity teams to ensure secure production deployments.
Soft Skills
Excellent communication, ability to simplify complex AI concepts.
Leadership presence with hands-on technical credibility.
Ability to collaborate in a matrixed global organization.
Passion for innovation and continuous exploration of emerging GenAI capabilities.
We do not expect that any single candidate would fulfill all of these characteristics. For instance, we have exciting team members who are really focused on building scalable systems but didn’t work with payments technology or web applications before joining Visa
Visa is an EEO Employer
Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.
