Director, Engineering - Agentic Systems (AI Concierge)

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.

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 solve massive scale problems centered on new payment flows, business and data solutions, cyber security, and B2C platforms.

The Opportunity:

The Director of Engineering will lead and scale the engineering organization responsible for Affluent Charter’s benefit discovery and redemption platforms, with a key focus on the development of AI‑powered and agentic systems that enhance how customers discover, understand, and redeem benefits.

This is a senior leadership role combining people management, technical strategy, and AI‑driven innovation. The Director will guide teams building intelligent, autonomous, and semi‑autonomous systems that improve personalization, automation, and operational efficiency, while maintaining high standards for security, reliability, and regulatory compliance.

The Work itself:

• Design code and systems that touch 40% of the world population while influencing Visa’s internal standards for scalability, security, and reusability
• Collaborate multi-functionally to create design artifacts and develop best-in-class software solutions for multiple Visa technical offerings
• Actively contribute to product quality improvements, valuable service technology, and new business flows in diverse agile squads
• Develop robust and scalable products intended for a myriad of customers including end-user merchants, b2b, and business to government solutions.
• Leverage innovative technologies to build the next generation of Payment Services, Transaction Platforms, Real-Time Payments, and Buy Now Pay Later Technology
• Opportunities to make a difference on a global or local scale through mentorship and continued learning opportunities

Essential Functions:

• Aligns enhancements and modifications to existing software coding standard processes and design specifications, across regions, and ensures they are aligned with current security standards.
• Guides the implementation of automation to improve effectiveness and efficiencies of systems and tools across regions and supports development and implementation of new automation, identifying where investment will yield the greatest efficiencies.
• Maintains communication with regional leadership across functions to monitor and direct the cadence of code reviews, on-call rotations, and incident responses throughout product development and operations cycles.
• Leverages back-end technical expertise on underlying systems/platforms across the organization to lead the development systematic improvements in processes to ensure the fulfillment of customer/business objectives.

The Skills You Bring:

Organizational & People Leadership

• Build, lead, and develop high‑performing engineering and AI platform teams, including managers and senior engineers.
• Coach and mentor engineering managers and technical leaders, supporting career growth and succession planning.
• Establish clear goals, performance expectations, and feedback mechanisms.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, experimentation, and responsible AI development.
• Partner with recruiting to attract and retain top engineering and AI talent.

Engineering Strategy & AI Enablement

• Own the engineering and AI strategy for benefit discovery and redemption experiences.
• Define and execute a roadmap for agentic systems that support intelligent benefit discovery, eligibility evaluation, redemption orchestration, and customer support automation.
• Translate business and product strategy into scalable technical plans that incorporate AI safely and effectively.
• Balance rapid innovation in AI with long‑term platform stability and maintainability.

Platform & Architecture Oversight

• Provide architectural guidance for distributed systems, APIs, data platforms, and AI services.
• Ensure agentic systems are designed with human‑in‑the‑loop controls, observability, and auditability.
• Champion best practices in model lifecycle management, evaluation, and monitoring.
• Ensure platforms meet standards for performance, security, privacy, and compliance, especially in regulated fintech environments.

Cross‑Functional & Executive Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product, Design, Data, Compliance, Legal, and Operations leaders.
• Communicate AI capabilities, limitations, risks, and progress clearly to executive and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Align engineering and AI initiatives with customer experience goals and business outcomes.
• Support executive decision‑making with clear technical trade‑offs and delivery plans.

Partner & Customer Enablement

• Oversee engineering efforts enabling AI‑driven partner integrations and benefit provider onboarding.
• Ensure APIs, tooling, and documentation support intelligent workflows and automation.
• Advocate for customer and partner needs, ensuring AI systems enhance clarity, trust, and usability.
• Incorporate customer and partner feedback into continuous improvement of AI‑powered experiences.

Process, Quality & Responsible AI

• Establish and evolve engineering and AI development processes that scale responsibly.
• Define and track KPIs across delivery, reliability, model performance, and customer experience.
• Ensure incident response, post‑mortems, and continuous improvement practices include AI systems.
• Implement governance for ethical, explainable, and compliant AI usage, including data handling and bias considerations.

We do not expect that any single candidate would fulfill all of these characteristics. For instance, we have exciting team members who are really focused on building scalable systems but didn’t work with payments technology or web applications before joining Visa.

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.

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
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or equivalent experience.
12+ years of professional software engineering experience.
5+ years in engineering management or director‑level leadership roles.
Demonstrated experience leading teams building AI‑powered platforms or agentic systems.
Technical & Leadership Expertise
Strong background in distributed systems, APIs, and platform engineering.
Experience designing or overseeing AI/ML systems, including LLM‑based or agentic architectures.
Familiarity with concepts such as autonomous agents, orchestration, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), and human‑in‑the‑loop workflows.
Understanding of model deployment, evaluation, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
Experience in fintech, benefits, loyalty, or regulated consumer platforms is a strong plus.
Professional Attributes
People‑first leader with a passion for developing engineers, managers, and AI practitioners.
Clear, credible communicator with executive presence.
Strong judgment navigating ambiguity, risk, and rapid technological change.
Customer‑centric mindset focused on building trustworthy, high‑impact AI experiences.
Comfortable owning outcomes and driving organizational transformation.

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 207,500.00 to 332,400.00 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.