Lead SW Engineer

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.

Visa’s Technology Organization is a community of problem solvers and innovators reshaping the future of commerce. We operate the world’s most sophisticated processing networks capable of handling more than 65k secure transactions a second across 80M merchants, 15k Financial Institutions, and billions of everyday people. While working with us you’ll get to work on complex distributed systems and tackle massive scale problems centered on new payment flows, business and data solutions, cyber security, and B2C platforms.

The Opportunity:

We are seeking innovative, adaptable, and passionate Software Engineering Lead ready to tackle complex challenges on a global scale. This role offers an exciting opportunity to work on high-impact applications in a fast-paced environment. As a Visa Software Engineer, you will be a key member of a cross-functional development team, inventing, designing, building, and testing software products for a worldwide customer base. You will contribute to cutting-edge payment technology, shaping the digital future of monetary transactions.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and oversee integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and GenAI capabilities into core services, ensuring reliability, efficiency, and adaptability.
• Drive the implementation of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, integrating vector databases and knowledge retrieval infrastructure.
• Define and enforce API design standards for GenAI services, including REST, gRPC, and streaming interfaces for model inference and knowledge access.
• Mentor and guide junior engineers, promoting best practices in software engineering, clean code, testing, and DevOps.
• Lead the development of agentic workflows using orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, or custom-built systems.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with ML engineers, data scientists, product managers, and architects to deliver end-to-end AI-powered solutions.
• Own the performance, observability, and reliability of backend systems, proactively identifying areas for optimization.
• Stay abreast of the latest developments in GenAI, backend technologies, and cloud infrastructure—and translate them into actionable strategy and architecture.
• Contribute to technology vision and roadmap, helping shape the next generation of AI-enhanced products and platform capabilities.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in 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.

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
•Demonstrated technical leadership in architecting and delivering scalable software systems, with a strong emphasis on API-first design and microservices.
•Hands-on experience designing, building, and deploying GenAI-powered applications using LLMs (e.g., GPT, Claude, Mistral) in production environments.
•Proficiency with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, including integration with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, FAISS, Weaviate) and document stores.
•Deep understanding of modern backend technologies and programming languages such as Java, Python, C#, or Go.
•Experience building orchestration and agentic workflows using frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, Autogen, or custom LLM-based routing engines.
•Expertise in developing and scaling APIs for AI inference, knowledge retrieval, or enterprise GenAI services.
•Familiarity with infrastructure and DevOps practices for GenAI workloads, including model deployment, CI/CD, and observability.
•Ability to guide cross-functional teams in GenAI initiatives, including close collaboration with ML scientists, product teams, and data engineers.
•A passion for mentoring engineers, fostering innovation, and shaping the future of AI-powered software development.

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 160,600.00 to 232,900.00 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.