Senior Director- Machine Learning at Visa in Austin, TX

About Us 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.

Job Description

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.

Visa is rapidly expanding our Value Added Services (VAS) product portfolio globally, and the VAS Architecture and Platform organization sits at the intersection of numerous technologies, platforms, and solutions that enable this growth.

Bellevue is a key technology hub for Visa, driving innovation, generative AI, and platform modernization initiatives. As the organizational lead for this site, you will oversee diverse engineering teams, guiding them as they deliver results for their respective product partners. Your teams will participate in complex multi-stakeholder initiatives where innovative integration patterns and emerging technologies are leveraged to enhance functionality and deliver greater value to the market.

The Opportunity:

We are seeking a dynamic and innovative leader with a proven track record of delivering modern, large-scale, and complex services and products powered by transformative technologies. The ideal candidate excels at leading through influence, inspiring high-performing and diverse technical teams at all levels of the organization. You will drive to success by fostering strong collaboration with product teams to achieve ambitious business goals.

In this role, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for multiple development teams, focusing on defining, executing, and delivering both functional and non-functional features on a scale. You will cultivate a culture of cross-functional collaboration and engineering excellence, championing new ideas and introducing industry best practices to benefit both the team and the broader organization. This position requires balancing business needs and innovative solutions with operational excellence, all while adhering to regulatory, security, and privacy standards.

You will be expected to rapidly evaluate and integrate new ideas and technologies from internal and external sources, aligning them with emerging business opportunities. By doing so, you will help build a culture of innovation and a relentless drive for excellence.

We are looking for a proven technology innovation leader with exceptional communication and organizational skills to drive both immediate modernization and the definition of long-term strategic solutions. Expertise in agile delivery, building purpose-driven teams, and managing complex integration projects involving multiple internal applications and third-party solutions is critical. Experience with Generative AI and Machine Learning is essential. Prior background in payments and AI is a strong plus.

The successful candidate will thrive in the dynamic payments space and be comfortable leading global teams responsible for platform transformation. You will play a pivotal role in expanding our VAS solutions footprint, exploring new paths to revenue by building modular, open solutions that will scale with our business.

Essential Functions:

Innovation and Technology Leadership

•    Spearhead the design, development, and implementation of innovative technologies and solutions, including generative AI and modern integration patterns.

•    Foster a culture of innovation by encouraging experimentation, knowledge sharing, and the adoption of emerging technologies within the engineering team.

•    Champion the design and development of APIs that integrate Value-Added Services applications, platforms, and solutions to drive incremental business value.

Strategic Vision and Execution

•    Develop and execute a strategic vision for the VAS platform that aligns with Visa's business goals and market opportunities.

•    Identify new market opportunities and enhance existing products to support business growth and platform modernization.

•    Lead the execution of the product modernization roadmap, ensuring scalability, reliability, and alignment with industry best practices.

Engineering and Operational Excellence

•    Own the end-to-end software development lifecycle, ensuring timely delivery of quality, secure, and high-performing solutions with significant business impact.

•    Promote engineering excellence by driving best practices in quality, security, performance, scalability, and resilience.

•    Manage technical debt, optimize development costs, and oversee the prioritization and delivery of enhancements and maintenance activities for multiple services.

•    Drive automation in software development, testing, and deployment processes to enhance productivity and time-to-market.

•    Ensure effective incident, change, and problem management within the platform.

Team Leadership and Talent Development

•    Hire, retain, and develop high-performing, diverse, global engineering teams.

•    Invest in career development through mentoring, coaching, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

•    Build purpose-driven teams with a strong focus on accountability, collaboration, and innovation.

Stakeholder and Client Engagement

•    Collaborate cross-functionally with geographically distributed development, product, operations, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and support teams to deliver complete solutions.

•    Engage directly with clients and key stakeholders to understand needs, gather feedback, and ensure the VAS platform delivers exceptional value and innovation.

Operational Management

•    Oversee daily operations including budgeting, planning, resource management, delivery tracking, quality assurance, partner relationships, and performance metrics.

•    Ensure compliance with regulatory, security, and privacy standards across all development activities.

Continuous Improvement

•    Continuously assess and improve technology stacks, development processes, and methodologies to enhance productivity, quality, and efficiency.

•    Lead initiatives to modernize and scale the VAS platform, expanding market reach and client base through best-in-class technology solutions.

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

Language Expertise: Expertise in one or more general development languages (e.g., Python, Java, NodeJS, C#, C++)

Builder: Experience building and deploying modern services and web applications with quality and scalability

Learner: Constant drive to learn new technologies such as Angular, React, Kubernetes, Docker, etc.

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.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications -10 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 8 years of work experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters/ MBA/JD/MD) or at least 3 years of work experience with a PhD

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
• Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters or PhD) with 12+ or more years of relevant experience.
• Hands-on experience with emerging technologies, including Generative AI and Machine Learning.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience building microservices using HTTP, REST, JSON, and XML.
• Demonstrated experience as an innovation leader, successfully guiding engineering teams to deliver new products or features to the market.
• Proven track record in managing software development teams delivering highly available, enterprise-level, distributed applications using languages such as Java, Python, C#, Golang, or similar.
• Deep understanding of Agile methodologies and software development lifecycle.
• Experience working in complex organizational environments, interpreting business and customer needs, and delivering optimal solutions.
• Ability to articulate technical and business issues and solutions to various internal and external stakeholders to support organizational objectives.
• Skilled in establishing technical goals for projects, defining actionable success metrics, and tracking progress.
• Strong experience in coordinating multiple product and technical teams, adept at removing roadblocks and collaboratively solving complex problems.
• Exceptional verbal, written, presentation, and facilitation skills, with the ability to communicate complex ideas clearly and concisely to diverse audiences.
• Experience delivering integrated solutions composed of both internally developed applications and third-party commercial offerings.
• Proficient in measuring services from the user experience perspective, setting and monitoring SLAs and KPIs.
• Payment industry experience is highly desirable.

U.S. Applicants Only The estimated salary range for this position is $232,300.00 to $ 406,600.00 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.

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 protect veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.