Software Engineer - Senior Consultant level

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

The Opportunity:

This is an exceptional opportunity to join Visa’s Engineering and AI organization to design, scale, and optimize our large-scale data engineering and AI/ML infrastructure powering mission-critical products. As part of the Post Purchase Solutions team, you will lead the architecture and implementation of next-generation data pipelines, integrating structured and unstructured data across Hadoop and cloud-based systems (AWS/Azure) to unlock actionable insights and support intelligent decisioning models.
You will partner closely with AI/ML, product, and analytics teams to build secure, scalable, and high-performance data systems that fuel advanced AI models, insights generation, and data-driven automation. This role combines hands-on engineering excellence with architectural leadership to transform Visa’s post-purchase ecosystem into a data-first, AI-powered platform.

The Work itself:

• Architect and Lead Data Solutions: Design and implement large-scale, distributed data systems integrating Hadoop, Apache Spark, Databricks, and cloud-native (AWS/Azure) services.
• Build Enterprise Data Pipelines: Develop robust ETL and streaming pipelines that handle large volumes of transactional and behavioral data, supporting machine learning and analytics workloads.
• Data Warehouse Modernization: Lead modernization of the Hadoop-based data warehouse, ensuring scalability, data quality, lineage, and governance standards are met.
• AI/ML Data Infrastructure: Collaborate with AI scientists to deliver data models optimized for ML pipelines, feature engineering, and model training using frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, and MCP.
• Insight Generation: Design and build reusable frameworks to extract, transform, and surface insights from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data sources (e.g., JSON, logs, events).
• Proof of Concept & Innovation: Lead POC initiatives to evaluate emerging technologies (Delta Lake, Iceberg, Kafka, Arrow, etc.) and translate findings into scalable production systems.
• Security & Compliance: Collaborate with InfoSec to ensure end-to-end data encryption, secure access, and compliance with Visa’s global data privacy standards.
• Mentorship & Leadership: Coach junior engineers and data scientists, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and innovation.
• Work closely with global data engineering team members across India and the US to ensure consistent design standards, alignment on architecture decisions, and high-quality delivery.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product management, AI, and platform teams to align engineering initiatives with business goals and long-term data strategy.

Essential Functions:

• Works directly with product owners to gather and refine requirements across products, adding and taking into account existing tools and solutions across the organization.
• Develops and designs advanced architect solutions that are robust and scalable, considering integrations with other solutions across the internal technical ecosystem.
• Provides domain expertise on the development of technical documentation of solutions and contributes to standard processes in technical documentation as needed.
• Plays a key role in the development and delivery of new features across products from end-to-end.

The Skills You Bring:

• Energy and Experience: A growth mindset that is curious and passionate about technologies and enjoys challenging projects on a global scale
• Challenge the Status Quo: Comfort in pushing the boundaries, ‘hacking’ beyond traditional solutions
• Data Platform Expertise: Deep experience in Hadoop ecosystem, Apache Spark, Databricks, Airflow, Python, SQL, and Scala
• Builder: Experience building and deploying modern services and web applications with quality and scalability
• Learner: Constant drive to learn new technologies
• Partnership: Experience collaborating with Product, Test, Dev-ops, and Agile/Scrum teams
• 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:
8+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 5 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 2 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 11+ years of relevant work experience.

Preferred Qualifications:
9 or more years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor Degree or 7 or more relevant years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 3 or more years of experience with a PhD
12+ years of relevant experience with a Bachelor’s degree, or 10+ years with a Master’s degree, or 9+ years with a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field.
Proven experience architecting and deploying enterprise-grade data pipelines and warehouse systems in large-scale, high-availability environments.
Deep experience in Hadoop ecosystem, Apache Spark, Databricks, Python, SQL, and Scala.
Strong knowledge of AWS/Azure cloud data services, including S3, Glue, Synapse, Redshift, and Delta Lake.
Proficiency with ETL frameworks, Kafka, Airflow, and Kubernetes-based containerized environments.
Hands-on experience designing REST APIs, data ingestion frameworks, and metadata management systems.
Familiarity with MCP tools and clients, RAG pipelines, and Lang Chain/Lang Graph for generative AI integration.
Expertise in data modeling, dimensional schema design, and performance optimization for analytics and ML workloads.
Understanding of data lineage, security, compliance, and governance frameworks.
Ability to perform root cause analysis, capacity planning, and data cost optimization in hybrid cloud environments.
Demonstrated success as a technical lead or architect driving large cross-functional data initiatives.
Proven ability to mentor engineering teams and communicate effectively across technical and executive audiences.
Data Systems: Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Databricks, Snowflake, Delta Lake, Airflow
Cloud Platforms: AWS (Glue, EMR, S3, Redshift), Azure (Synapse, Data Factory)
Languages: Python, Scala, SQL, Java, Shell scripting
AI Integration: Lang Chain, Lang Graph, RAG pipelines, MCP tools
CI/CD: Jenkins, GitLab, Argo-CD, Docker, 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 152,200.00 to 220,850.00 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.