Principal Data Scientist

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.

We are looking for a versatile, curious, and energetic Principal Data Scientist to join our team of passionate and dedicated engineers. We are the backbone for innovative data science and artificial intelligence developments at Visa and we thrive on solving complex challenges on a global scale! As a Principal Data Scientist, you will be an integral part of a multi-functional development team inventing, designing, building, and testing products that reach a truly global customer base.

You will face big challenges and question the status quo, changing the way data products are developed at Visa! Come join us and see your efforts shape the digital future of payments.

The focus is on defining, executing, and delivering product and technical features at scale quickly and promoting a diverse culture of cross-functional collaboration and engineering excellence. Be an idea leader and bring industry best practices to benefit the team and the wider organization. The ability to balance demanding business capabilities with building for operational excellence while meeting regulatory, security and privacy requirements.

Ability to quickly grasp and evaluate new ideas and technologies from internal and external sources. Lead/Influence multiple teams, matching them with appropriate technology and business problems while building a culture of both innovation and drive for excellence.

Transform our digital offerings by leveraging AI to enhance our current product line and develop exciting new products targeting our banking, fintech and integration partners, which will enable the next wave of innovation in payments. We need a strong technology leader, who is an expert in data science, agile delivery, building purpose driven teams, and has a background in complex integration projects. Prior experience in payments, or a background in building high volume transaction and data processing systems is preferred.

The successful candidate will be comfortable navigating the challenging dynamic payments space and leading global teams responsible for platform transformation efforts. This candidate will play a pivotal role in our continued embrace of AI, seeking new paths to revenue by improving delivery efficiency and pushing forward for new products.

Essential Functions:

• Provides technical expertise and mentors others to implement extensible, maintainable, and reusable code, defines framework, principles, coding patterns, guidelines, styles, and standard methodologies, and adheres to all security requirements for the application of artificial intelligence and data science.
• Develops strategies for and leads team's efforts to drive efficiencies across data extraction and ensure data quality and completeness using data wrangling, complex data modeling, and artificial intelligence.
• Ensures adherence to data management principles, governance, process, and tools to maintain data quality across products.
• Advises on technical specifications during discussions with collaborators (e.g., Product owners, business partners, Cybersecurity) to identify and clarify sophisticated technical or business requirements and identify business needs and upstream and/or downstream system/application dependencies.
• Defines technical standards for the design and documents the architecture for a complex product, using existing architecture design patterns.
• Oversees and establishes unit testing requirements of unit testing to confirm functional capability of code, acts as subject matter expert in testing for coding standards and security scans, strategically leads user acceptance testing in collaboration with customer across multiple domains.
• Identifies complex trends across relevant data sources and uses insights to plan platform-wide future solution updates. Identifies opportunities and defines roadmap for software upgrades and server patches for security remediation where applicable.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in the office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Basic Qualifications:

• 12+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 9 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 6 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 15+ years of relevant work experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 15 or more years of experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or 12 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, or MD), PhD with 9+ years of experience
• Six (6) years of experience solving data problems using data technologies (e.g., Hadoop, Hive, Kafka, Redis, NoSQL, RDBMS).
• Four (4) years of experience designing, implementing, and maintaining ETL pipelines.
• Three (3) years of experience building and pushing code into production.
• Three (3) years of experience implementing and supporting real-time systems.
• Expert in at least one of the following: Golang, Java, or C/C++
• Expert with web service standards and related patterns (REST, gRPC).
• Experience developing large scale, enterprise class distributed system or subsystems that require high availability, low latency, & strong data consistency computing.
• Experience implementing solutions for low-latency, distributed services using open standard technologies.
• Experience with Big Data and Analytics in general leveraging technologies like Hadoop, Spark, Flink and MapReduce.

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 207,500.00 to 301,250.00 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.