Data Engineer- Data Science Platform

Visa is a world leader in payments and technology, with over 259 billion payments transactions flowing safely between consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government entities in more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable, and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive while driven by a common purpose – to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

Make an impact with a purpose-driven industry leader. Join us today and experience Life at Visa.

We are looking for a Data Engineer to join our Merchant Data Platform’s Data Science & Modeling team — the group building the next generation of AI‑powered merchant intelligence. This team is responsible for the core data and ML capabilities that power our merchant ecosystem, from data enrichment and quality to real‑time insights and generative‑AI experiences.

What the Team Is Doing

The Merchant Data Platform team owns the full lifecycle of merchant intelligence:

• Processing and modeling hundreds of millions of transactions each day, transforming raw behavioral data into powerful merchant‑level features and signals.
• Developing GenAI‑driven merchant data enrichment, including agents that reason over unstructured data (web, documents, support logs) to auto‑classify merchants and identify missing attributes.

Why This Role Is Exciting

This is not a standard data engineering role. It’s a chance to shape how AI understands merchants and powers every experience built on top of merchant data. You will work at the intersection of high‑performance data systems, machine learning, and applied GenAI.

You will:

• Build ML‑ready datasets, features, and signals that directly feed merchant‑facing models.
• Collaborate with DS/ML teams on LLM fine‑tuning pipelines, embeddings, retrieval systems, and agent orchestration.
• Design systems that ensure data quality, lineage, monitoring, and trust for every downstream consumer.
• Partner with product and engineering to unlock merchant‑level intelligence that impacts growth, risk, operations, and customer experience.
• This is a high‑ownership environment with deep technical challenges: high throughput, real‑time data, multimodal signals, and novel AI applications that don’t have a playbook.

What Candidates Can Expect

• Hard technical problems: streaming feature pipelines and large‑scale batch/real‑time computation.
• End‑to‑end exposure, from ingestion to model outputs to end‑user AI experiences.
• Opportunities to experiment with next‑generation LLMs, fast inference runtimes, and AI agents.
• A collaborative, mission‑driven team that values experimentation, craftsmanship, and measurable impact.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

Basic Qualifications:

•  Minimum of 6 months of work experience or a Bachelor's Degree

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer science, Machine Learning, Data Science or related field.
• Strong experience coding in Python.
• Skilled in SQL basic libraries for machine learning such as scikit-learn and Pandas, as well as Jupyter Notebook.
• Nice to have: Experience with Big Data and analytics in general leveraging technologies like Hadoop, Spark, and Query Engines.
• Nice to have: Relevant experiences in modeling techniques such as logistic regression, Naive Bayes, SVM, decision trees, natural language processing or neural networks.
• Nice to have: Experience in cloud services (AWS preferable – Sage Maker, EMR, Glue).
• Nice to have: Understand ML infrastructure concepts such as feature store, batch inference and model pipeline orchestration.

Work Hours: Varies upon the needs of the department.

Travel Requirements: This position requires travel 5-10% of the time.

Mental/Physical Requirements: This position will be performed in an office setting.  The position will require the incumbent to sit and stand at a desk, communicate in person and by telephone, frequently operate standard office equipment, such as telephones and computers.

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.

Visa will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable local law, including the requirements of Article 49 of the San Francisco Police Code.

U.S. APPLICANTS ONLY: The estimated salary range for a new hire into this position is $97,800.00 to $138,550.00 USD per year, which may include potential sales incentive payments (if applicable). Salary may vary depending on job-related factors which may include knowledge, skills, experience, and location. In addition, this position may be eligible for bonus and equity. Visa has a comprehensive benefits package for which this position may be eligible that includes Medical, Dental, Vision, 401 (k), FSA/HSA, Life Insurance, Paid Time Off, and Wellness Program.