Lead Software Engineer – Agentic AI, IAM & Authentication

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.

Platform Products builds the shared foundations that enable Visa to scale innovation across multiple businesses. In this role, you’ll work on foundational systems with broad organizational impact, helping define how AI‑native capabilities are designed, deployed, and scaled responsibly at Visa.

As a Lead Software Engineer within Visa’s Platform Products organization, you will provide technical leadership to build the next generation of Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Authentication capabilities. You will work on high‑scale, distributed systems that support new and evolving payment flows, partnering closely with product, architecture, and engineering teams.

This role requires hands‑on experience building agentic AI systems, including AI agents, context management, and retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG). The focus is on building production‑ready, reliable AI‑native services, not prototypes or experiments.

Essential Functions:

• Lead architecture and design for cross‑team and cross‑product initiatives, from concept through production.
• Establish and reinforce engineering best practices by example, including writing and reviewing production code.
• Define and promote platform standards, reusable frameworks, and shared services.
• Build secure, scalable, resilient, API‑centric systems designed for global use.
• Partner with Product and Architecture teams to deliver solutions aligned with business strategy.
• Influence enterprise technology selection and architectural direction.
• Drive operational excellence across deployment, monitoring, logging, and security.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to building high‑performing, inclusive engineering teams.
• Contribute to GenAI initiatives that improve developer productivity and enable product innovation.
• Share technical knowledge and thought leadership across the organization.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in the office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Basic Qualifications:

• 10+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 7 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 4 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 13+ years of relevant work experience.

Candidates must have hands‑on, production experience with:

• Building AI agents that execute multi‑step workflows using tools or APIs.
• Context management techniques such as state handling, memory, summarization, or session management.
• Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG), including retrieval design, grounding strategies, and quality evaluation.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 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
• Experience designing and building distributed systems and shared platform services.
• Strong experience with Java, Spring, and modern service‑oriented architectures.
• Expertise in API design and service communication patterns (e.g., REST, gRPC).
• Experience with microservices, containerization, API gateways, caching, and security.
• Strong understanding of system integration patterns and architectural trade‑offs.
• Experience with CI/CD, automation, monitoring, logging, and secure DevOps practices.
• Advanced knowledge of AI / Generative AI concepts and applied system design.
• Experience in payments, identity, or security domains is a plus.
• Nice‑to‑have: experience building evaluation or monitoring frameworks for AI system reliability.

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 this position is $173,100.00 to $276,800.00 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.