Sr. Data 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 a versatile, curious, and energetic Senior Data Engineer to join our team of passionate and dedicated engineers. As the backbone of Data Engineering and Machine Learning innovation at Visa, we thrive on solving complex challenges at global scale.

In this role, you will be a key member of a cross-functional team that invents, designs, builds, and tests data-driven products serving a worldwide customer base. You’ll also have the opportunity to redefine how data products are built at Visa by contributing to cutting-edge AI and data platform initiatives.
 

Essential Functions

• Design and implement scalable, high-performance data pipelines for both structured and unstructured data.
• Build and maintain internal APIs and data services to securely expose and serve data and ML model outputs.
• Champion best practices in data quality, governance, observability, and performance optimization.
• Develop, train, and fine-tune AI/ML models for business use cases such as classification, recommendation, NLP, and computer vision.
• Build and optimize LLM-based applications using prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Drive model evaluation, experimentation, A/B testing, and continuous learning pipelines.
• Enable Agentic AI systems by building infrastructure that supports autonomous workflows, orchestration, and decision-making loops.
• Collaborate closely with data scientists, product managers, and software engineers to integrate intelligent systems into scalable production environments.

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

Basic Qualifications:
• 2 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD, or PhD)

Preferred Qualifications:
• 3 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or more than 2 years of work experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD)
• 2+ years of experience building and pushing code into production.
• 2+ years of relevant work experience solving data problems using data technologies (e.g., Hadoop, Hive, Kafka, Redis, NoSQL, RDBMS).
• 2+ years of experience training and deploying Machine Learning models into production.
• Strong software engineering background with experience in Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs (e.g., GPT, Claude, Mistral), vector databases (e.g., FAISS, Pinecone), and orchestration tools (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, Autogen).
• Experience building AI applications on top of enterprise-scale data systems.

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 116,500.00 to 164,500.00 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.