Lead Software Engineer

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 Job Summary: The Lead Software Engineer is the highest individual contributor technical role responsible for setting technical vision, driving architectural excellence, and solving the most complex technical challenges   for Visa's Acceptance Solutions platform, focusing on transaction processing platform . This role combines deep technical   expertise   (40-50% hands-on) with strategic leadership, cross-organizational influence, and pioneering adoption of Generative AI and agentic AI at scale. The Work Itself: Design and build scalable, secure, and resilient software systems that support Visa’s Acceptance Solutions platform and global transaction processing capabilities. Set technical direction and influence architectural standards for distributed systems, platform reliability, scalability, security, and reusability. Lead the development of mission-critical transaction processing solutions that support high-volume payment flows, event-driven processing, and real-time data movement. Collaborate with product, architecture, security, operations, and engineering teams to create design artifacts and deliver best-in-class software solutions. Solve complex technical challenges across cloud-native platforms, distributed architecture, event streaming, API security, and payment lifecycle management. Actively contribute to product quality, platform modernization, value-added services, and new business flows through hands-on development and technical leadership. Leverage modern technologies, including cloud platforms, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AI-enabled engineering practices, to advance Visa’s next-generation payment capabilities. Mentor engineers, influence technical leaders, and promote a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, continuous learning, and measurable business impact. Essential Functions: Lead the architecture, design, development, enhancement, and modernization of software solutions for Visa’s Acceptance Solutions transaction processing platform. Develop secure, scalable, high-quality code that complies with design specifications, engineering standards, and security best practices. Provide hands-on technical leadership for complex software development efforts while influencing technical direction across multiple teams. Drive design and code reviews to ensure solutions meet expectations for performance, resiliency, observability, scalability, security, and maintainability. Identify and implement automation opportunities across development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operational workflows. Partner with product owners, architects, security teams, operations teams, and engineering stakeholders to align technical solutions with customer and business objectives. Use production telemetry, system analysis, and operational insights to recommend improvements to architecture, code, processes, and platform reliability. Support agile delivery, release readiness, on-call rotations, incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement of production systems. Guide the adoption of modern engineering practices, including cloud-native development, event-driven architecture, secure integration patterns, and AI-enabled development workflows. Mentor senior engineers, develop technical talent, and contribute to reusable frameworks, architecture documentation, and engineering best practices. Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager. Qualifications 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. 15+ years of experience with progressive technical leadership responsibilities.  Demonstrated   track record   as a technical leader with organization-wide impact.   Deep   expertise   in designing and scaling mission-critical distributed systems.   Proven ability to solve complex problems that span multiple technical domains.   Experience setting technical direction and influencing strategy across teams.   Expert   proficiency   in modern programming languages and system design.   Mastery of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), Kubernetes, and distributed architecture.   Deep experience with event-driven systems, Kafka, and high-throughput data processing.   Experience with security architecture (OAuth 2.0, JWT,   mTLS , encryption, IAM).   Track record   of mentoring senior engineers and developing technical leaders.   Experience pioneering AI-enabled engineering practices at   organizational   scale.   Deep understanding of payment processing and transaction lifecycle   Expertise   in event-driven architecture and event streaming platforms (Kafka)   Knowledge of payment capture processing and event enrichment   Experience with file transfer protocols (SFTP) and batch processing. Experience in payments, financial services, or high-scale transaction processing.   Recognized   expertise   in distributed systems (publications, speaking