Senior Director of Data Engineering

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 is rapidly expanding its Value-Added Services (VAS) product portfolio globally, with the VAS Architecture and Platform organization positioned at the intersection of diverse technologies, platforms, and solutions that drive this growth.

We are seeking a Senior Director with deep expertise in data and machine learning system development and operations. This leader will play a crucial role in both strategic and tactical planning and execution, continuously advancing the vision and mission of the AI Platform. In this role, you will be a dedicated and versatile data engineering leader, capable of thriving in a fast-paced environment and contributing as an active member of Agile scrum teams.

As a key member of the leadership team, you will shape the technical roadmap, introduce cutting-edge machine learning and system technologies, collaborate with development managers to address technical challenges, and partner with product and data science teams to streamline feature requests and model onboarding.

Essential Functions:

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of scalable and secure data pipelines, platforms, and ML/AI infrastructure, leveraging cloud-native technologies and big data frameworks.
• Oversee the integration of structured and unstructured data sources to support advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI initiatives.
• Evaluate, implement, and champion new tools and technologies to improve productivity, scalability, and effectiveness of data engineering efforts.
• Establish and enforce data engineering best practices, technical standards, governance, and quality standards, ensuring continuous improvement and technical excellence.
• Ensure data security, privacy, compliance, system performance, scalability, and availability across all data engineering projects and platforms.
• Define, monitor, and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success and impact of data engineering activities.
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and resolution for data platform issues, ensuring high availability and reliability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams—including Data Science, Analytics, Product, Engineering, and project teams—to deliver robust data-driven business solutions and define technical roadmaps.
• Mentor, coach, and grow a high-performing team of data engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, excellence, and continuous learning, oversee talent development and team pipeline evolution.
• Partner with senior leadership to define, execute, and communicate the enterprise data strategy, represent the data engineering function in executive meetings and strategic planning sessions.
• Develop and manage budgets, resource planning, and vendor relationships for data engineering initiatives.
• Promote a data-driven culture by enabling self-service analytics and democratizing access to data across the organization.

This position will be based in Foster City or Bellevue. If this sounds exciting, we want to chat and tell you more about our work culture and environment and see if this will be a good fit for both of us.

This is a hybrid position. Expectations 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:

• 12+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelors degree, OR 15+ years of relevant work experience.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 15–20 years of experience in data engineering, software development, or related technical roles.
• Proven experience leading large-scale data engineering teams and projects in a complex enterprise environment.
• Expertise in data architecture, ETL/ELT pipelines, data warehousing, and real-time data processing.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure) and big data technologies (e.g., Spark, Kafka, Hadoop).
• Strong understanding of data modeling, data governance, and data quality frameworks.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Track record of delivering high-impact data solutions that drive business outcomes.
• Master’s, PhD in Computer Science or related technical discipline
• Experience in financial services, payments, or a highly regulated industry.
• Experience working with Data and AI, designing, and building ML infrastructure to train or serve models.
• Strong sense of ownership, urgency, and leadership abilities in an engineering environment in driving operational excellence and standard methodologies.
• Experience working on large open-source projects, preferably in the ML infrastructure domain like TensorFlow, Ray, JAX, PyTorch, Horovod.
• Contributions to open-source data engineering tools or communities.

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 226,900.00 to 354,500.00 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.