Director, Software Engineering

Overview

Lead a team of engineers building secure, high-performing distributed systems for payment acceptance on the Visa Acceptance Platform, while remaining hands-on with architecture, code and delivery decisions.

What you'll do

• Serve as the hands-on technical lead for the Payment Processing Platform, providing technical direction across architecture, design, implementation, scalability, resiliency, and operational readiness.
• Lead the design, implementation, and deployment of secure, reliable, robust, and interoperable payment acceptance products.
• Provide engineering leadership to ensure solutions align with platform principles, architecture standards, and Visa-grade availability, resiliency, and operational excellence expectations.
• Remain actively hands-on with architecture, design reviews, code reviews, proof-of-concepts, performance analysis, debugging, technical troubleshooting, production-readiness, and critical delivery decisions.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Set technical direction for event-driven data flows, transaction enrichment, search indexing, analytics pipelines, user-facing dashboards, observability, and operational insights.
• Lead technical design for event correlation, transaction matching, retry handling, dead-letter queues, replay, idempotency, exactly-once processing considerations, and high-throughput data movement.
• Establish and continuously improve engineering best practices for application development, testing, deployment, observability, monitoring, incident response, and operational readiness.
• Partner with application, data, platform, product, regional, business, client-facing, security, privacy, risk, governance, compliance, and operations teams to translate requirements into high-quality solutions that meet functional and non-functional requirements and applicable policies, standards, regulatory expectations, and customer commitments.
• Communicate and present technical strategy, tradeoffs, risks, dependencies, delivery progress, and recommendations clearly to executive leaders, business partners, product partners, architecture forums, and engineering teams.
• Coach, mentor, and develop engineers, senior engineers, technical leads, and engineering leaders through regular feedback, design reviews, architecture discussions, technical deep dives, production troubleshooting, 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.
• Bring forward new ideas, engineering improvements, and technology recommendations that increase team effectiveness, improve developer productivity, and advance platform capabilities.
• Influence technical strategy across teams without relying on formal reporting authority.

What you'll need

• 10+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree, OR 13+ years of relevant work experience.

Nice to have

• 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.
• Demonstrated success leading high-performing, multi-disciplinary, and geographically distributed software engineering teams, including people management, coaching, performance development, delivery accountability, and hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical talent.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating globally distributed, mission-critical systems that require high availability, scalability, resiliency, and security, and that support very high transaction volumes with strict availability, latency, security, and compliance requirements.
• 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, with a 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.
• 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, including resilient patterns such as event correlation, transaction matching, retry mechanisms, dead-letter queues, replay, idempotency, and exactly-once processing considerations.
• 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, and implementing, deploying, or governing AI/ML, Generative AI, or agentic AI capabilities in production environments or engineering workflows.
• Experience in payments, financial services, fintech, or high-scale transaction processing environments, including payment processing, transaction lifecycle concepts, payment network protocols, and acceptance workflows.
• Experience partnering with executive leadership, product leaders, technical product managers, regional teams, and business stakeholders to define strategy, roadmaps, requirements, priorities, and delivery plans.
• 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.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru, India.