Sr. Director - Software Engineering (Java, GenAI, Payment Risk, Cloud, NoSQL - 18+ years' exp)

Overview

Lead engineering for key capabilities within the Risk and Security Solutions (RAS) organization at Visa, as a deeply technical, AI-forward engineering leader who owns architecture, delivery and the technical strategy for high-scale, mission-critical distributed systems.

What you'll do

• Own the technical architecture, design, implementation, and delivery of customer-facing Risk & Security products and platform capabilities.
• Translate product strategy into scalable, secure, resilient, and operable distributed systems.
• Actively participate in code, design and architecture reviews, root-cause analysis, and contribute code when needed to unblock teams or accelerate critical initiatives.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for agentic development lifecycle, context engineering, code quality evals, performance, scalability, availability, observability, maintainability, and secure software delivery.
• Partner with Product Management, Cybersecurity, SRE/Operations to deliver solutions that maximize customer value, platform health, and execution predictability.
• Build and execute technology roadmaps that balance business priorities, engineering sustainability, technical debt reduction, and operational efficiency.
• Drive adoption of engineering best practices including CI/CD, test automation and telemetry.
• Communicate technical strategy, execution status, key tradeoffs, risks, and architectural decisions clearly to senior leadership.
• Attract, retain and grow high-performing engineering talent.
• Enable technical and process innovation through thought leadership and influence.
• Understand current and future trends within the payments industry.

What you'll need

• 18+ years of relevant work experience with a bachelor's degree or with an Advanced degree.
• Led a team of 40+ made up of full-time employees, contractors and AI agents.
• Proven hands-on technical leadership by actively participating in code and design reviews.
• Built a culture of engineering excellence (context engineering, code quality evals, security, performance, scalability, availability, resilience etc.).
• Effectively managed complex technical interdependencies across geographical teams.
• Partnered with product management in developing a strategy and roadmap that align with business and engineering goals.
• Partnered with remote teams to ensure alignment across product development.
• Bring a global mindset.
• Demonstrated ability to hire, coach, retain, and develop high-performing engineers and engineering leaders while raising the overall technical bar of the organization.
• Enabled innovation through thought leadership and influence.
• Deep expertise in building and operating high-scale distributed systems with demanding requirements for latency, throughput, resilience, security, and availability.
• Strong architectural judgment across service decomposition, API design, asynchronous messaging, data consistency, caching, failure isolation, and recovery strategies.
• Excellent execution leadership with the ability to align teams, prioritize effectively, manage risk, and deliver against commitments in ambiguous or high-pressure environments.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills with the ability to influence Product, Operations, and senior stakeholders through technical credibility and data-driven communication.

Nice to have

• Experience with Agentic development and effective use of AI models, tools and agents.
• Significant experience leading the design and delivery of complex, enterprise-scale distributed systems in domains with high transaction volume, integration complexity, and stringent non-functional requirements.
• Strong hands-on engineering background in Java, Go, Rust, JavaScript etc. and modern backend development frameworks, with experience in concurrent or reactive architectures such as Vertx, or similar.
• Proven experience building microservices and service-based platforms using HTTP, REST, gRPC JSON, and modern service contract/interface design patterns.
• Strong working knowledge of distributed web architecture, including service discovery, containerized deployment models, distributed caching, event streaming, NoSQL, and RDBMS technologies.
• Experience designing and operating highly available, fault-tolerant, scalable, and observable services in production environments.
• Strong understanding of event-driven architecture, enterprise integration patterns, asynchronous processing, and API-based system interoperability.
• Experience with DevOps and modern software delivery practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, deployment automation, release orchestration, and capacity/performance planning.
• Strong understanding of application and platform security, including secure design, secure coding, access control, threat awareness, and contemporary security risks and controls.
• Experience with Agile engineering practices, technical governance, roadmap planning, dependency management, and execution in globally distributed organizations.
• Demonstrated ability to identify, communicate, and mitigate technical, operational, and delivery risk across a portfolio of products or multiple engineering teams.
• Strong analytical, architectural, and organizational leadership skills, with the ability to influence senior leadership and drive decisions through clarity, technical depth, and disciplined execution.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru, India.
• Visa requires at least 3 days in office, with expectations confirmed by the Hiring Manager.