Principal Data Engineer - AI Systems Performance Engineering

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 AI as a Service (VAIaS) operationalizes the delivery of AI and decision intelligence to ensure their ongoing business values. Built with composable AI capabilities, privacy-enhancing computation, and cloud native platforms, VAIaS automates the updates to data, models, and applications. Combined with strong AI governance, VAIaS optimizes the performance, scalability, interpretability and reliability of AI models and services. If you want to be in the exciting payment and AI space, learn fast, and make big impacts, Visa AI as a Service is an ideal place for you!

This position is for a Principal Data Engineer with solid development experience, who will contribute to both strategic and tactic planning and execution to continuously advance AI Platform's vision and mission. In this position, you are first a passionate and hard-working data engineer and system architect that can work in a multifaceted environment as a member of Agile Scrum teams.

You will be an integral part of the leadership team, setting up technical roadmap, introducing the latest machine learning and system technology to the team, working with development managers and teams to identify and resolve technical challenges, and working with different products and data science teams to streamline the feature request and model onboarding.

This position will be based in Austin, TX and reporting to Head of Visa AI as a Service. If this sounds exciting, we want to chat and tell you more about our work culture and environment and see if this will be a good fit for both of us.

Essential Functions:

• Collaborate with project teams, data science teams and development teams to drive the technical roadmap and guide development and implementation of new data driven business solutions.

• Drive technical standard and best practices, and continuously improve AI Platform Engineering scalability.

• Responsible for fine-tuning large-scale computing systems, performance benchmarking, load testing, and developing metrics instrumentation.

• Architecture and design of AI Platform services including Machine Learning Engines, In Memory Computing Systems, Streaming Computing Systems, Distributed Data Systems and etc in Java, Go, Rust or C++.

• Coordinate the implementation among development teams to ensure system performance, security, scalability and availability.

• Coaching and mentoring junior team members and evolving team talent pipeline.

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

Basic Qualifications:

• 12 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 10 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters/MBA /JD/MD), or a minimum of 5 years of work experience with a PhD.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 15 or more years of experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or 12 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, or MD), PhD with 9+ years of experience.
• Experience with Java, Go, Rust or C++.
• Expert in developing large-scale, enterprise-class data pipelines, data processing systems, and/or distributed systems or subsystems that require high availability, low-latency, and strong data consistency computing.
• Authority in architecting solutions with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery in mind.
• Expert in distributed in-memory computing technologies like Redis.
• Proven experience with performance engineering and fine-tuning large-scale data processing systems highly preferred.
• Open to experience with systems profiling and diagnostics using tools like perf, eBPF, vmstat, or iostat highly preferred.
• Experience with performance benchmarking and load testing, including designing tests, using load tools, and interpreting results for capacity and regressions highly preferred.
• Experience developing proper metrics instrumentation in software components, to help facilitate real-time and remote problem solving /performance monitoring.
• Knowledge of containerization and orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes.

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 $193,700.00 to $281,100.00 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.