Lead Data Engineer

Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

At Visa, you'll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world. Join Visa and do work that matters — to you, to your community, and to the world.

Progress starts with you.

As a member of the Global Benefits division within the Platform Product Technology organization, this role will be responsible for the ongoing product development, which include Big Data pipelines, AI integrations, and advanced systems that enable issuers to create, manage and distribute powerful cardholder value propositions globally. This role involves supporting and spearheading the development of new features, improving existing ones, ideating and innovating new solutions, designing complex systems and platforms, and ensuring the overall functionality of the Data products.

We are seeking a Lead Data Engineer who will play a crucial role in developing next-generation enterprise-level data pipelines and data assets for Real Time and Batch Data ingestion and processing, incorporating Agentic AI to support Visa's 2030 strategy. In this role, you will collaborate with business partners, stakeholders, data engineers, software engineers, and operations across the company to tackle complex, high-impact data-related initiatives on a global scale. You will also guide and mentor data engineers, ensuring security, scalability, performance, and reliability in all data solutions. As an individual contributor based in Warsaw, Poland you will be reporting to Director of Engineering based in Warsaw, Poland.

About the Role

• Oversee the entire data lifecycle, from data acquisition and ingestion to transformation, storage, and governance for both streaming and batch data pipelines and assets.
• Lead the analysis, design, development, and implementation of various initiatives, with end-to-end ownership to deliver business capabilities.  
• Ensure data security, privacy, governance, and compliance with all relevant regulations, and develop and implement auditable policies and procedures.
• Actively contribute with hands on development to critical projects by developing scalable and reusable modules, core frameworks and automation tools.
• Develop new products iteratively by building quick Proofs of Concept (POCs) and converting ideas into real products. 
• Establish engineering best practices for application development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and alerting.
• Champion the adoption of GenAI and Agentic AI technologies and develop strategies to integrate them into existing data pipeline workflows or develop new ones.
• Provide tech leadership and motivate a high performing team of data engineers through coaching and mentoring and elevate team talent expertise fostering a culture of innovation and continuous learning.
• Adhere to Visa's Leadership Principles by promoting collaboration, encouraging constructive debate, and executing with excellence.

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

Basic Qualifications: 

• 10+ years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or 8+ years of work experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters/MBA) or 3+ years of work experience with a PhD. 
• Extensive experience as a Data Engineer or in a similar role, with deep expertise in modelling, designing, implementing, deploying, and maintaining complex architectures for Big Data pipelines (ETL, batch, streaming), from inception to delivery. 
• Expertise in at least one programming language (preferably Java or Scala), and one scripting language (preferably Python). 
• Strong experience in large-scale distributed data processing systems using Apache Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Hive. 
• Experience working with SQL and RDBMS like MySQL or Postgres. 
• Experience in orchestration tools like Apache Airflow. 
• Experience in on-prem and/or cloud-based data platforms (AWS or GCP). 
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies, and modern DataOps / DevSecOps practices. 
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, interpersonal and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate data concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences. Ability to translate complex business problems into scalable technical solutions. 
• Experience or willingness in GenAI / Agentic engineering (e.g., LLMs, MCPs), and tools such as Cloud Code. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Proven ability to lead technical teams, manage multiple projects, and work effectively across geographies and functions. 
• Strong understanding of data quality frameworks, validation methods, and monitoring tools. 
• Experience working with Apache Iceberg, or Delta Tables Databricks. 
• Experience in deployment with automated and scalable CI/CD tools (e.g. Github Actions, Jenkins, Maven), and IaC tools such as Terraform. 
• Experience developing proper metrics instrumentation in Data Platform components using Prometheus, Grafana for operational excellence and incident management. 
• Experience with containerization technologies and orchestration tools, including Docker and Kubernetes. 

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.