Senior Director - Software Engineering (18+ years' exp, Java, AWS, AEM, GenAI)

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 global community of problem solvers and innovators shaping the future of commerce. We operate one of the world’s most sophisticated payment and risk processing networks—capable of handling more than 65K secure transactions per second across 80M merchants, 15K financial institutions, and billions of consumers worldwide. Our teams tackle some of the most complex challenges in distributed systems, global-scale platforms, cybersecurity, data, and next-generation B2C and B2B experiences. We are seeking a Senior Director of Software Engineering to provide strategic and technical leadership for large-scale, distributed foundational services. This role is responsible for defining long-term platform vision, driving a cloud-first and cloud-native architecture, and ensuring the delivery of highly available, secure, and performant systems at global scale. As a senior technology leader, you will operate at the intersection of engineering excellence, product strategy, and business outcomes, influencing enterprise-wide architecture decisions and shaping Visa’s technology roadmap across multiple regions and portfolios. Essential Functions: Define and govern enterprise-level architecture and engineering standards, ensuring alignment with global security, compliance, and regulatory requirements. Drive automation and platform efficiencies across systems and tools, prioritizing investments that deliver the highest business and operational impact. Establish and oversee global operating rhythms, including code quality standards, incident management, on-call excellence, and production readiness. Leverage deep expertise across backend platforms and distributed systems to lead systemic improvements in reliability, scalability, and developer productivity. Ensure technology execution consistently meets customer, business, and regulatory expectations across regions and product lines. This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your hiring manager. Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager. Qualifications Qualifications: 18+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or with an Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. 15+ years of progressive engineering experience, including 12+ years leading large‑scale product development and delivery teams. Proven expertise across modern technology stacks, including Java/J2EE, Adobe AEM, Spring Boot, React, RESTful APIs, SQL/NoSQL databases, Kubernetes, Kafka, and test automation frameworks. Demonstrated success driving measurable improvements in engineering productivity, delivery velocity, system performance, reliability, and operational excellence through data‑driven leadership. Deep experience with cloud‑native architectures, leveraging AWS and/or Azure, containerization (Docker), Kubernetes, serverless computing, and automated CI/CD pipelines. Advanced knowledge of Generative AI and Agentic AI, including hands‑on experience integrating LLMs, vector databases, RAG, prompt engineering, and AI governance into production platforms to achieve order‑of‑magnitude productivity gains. Strong foundation in secure‑by‑design architecture, including zero‑trust, defense‑in‑depth, and compliance‑driven engineering within highly regulated, mission‑critical environments. Recognized architectural leadership, with experience designing and operating globally distributed, active‑active, multi‑region platforms requiring high availability, resilience, and scalability. Exceptional leadership, communication, and strategic thinking skills, with the ability to influence at all levels, mentor senior leaders, and articulate complex technical strategies to executive and business stakeholders. 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. If you thrive on rapid growth and enjoy working alongside positive, driven teammates, you’ll feel right at home here. Help us to uplift everyone, everywhere. Whether you’re starting your career, pushing your capabilities or are a seasoned professional, learn how we can partner to reimagine the world. Introduce yourself to our recruiters and we'll get in touch if there's a role that seems like a good match. At Visa, we are driven by a common purpose – to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid. Our evolving technology keeps us at the heart of the digital economy, connecting people to 80+ million businesses worldwide. Backed by a resilient, proven model, our expanding network fuels growth—for Visa and for your career. Your journey starts here — discover how we hire Ready to take the next step? Learn more about life at Visa, explore our hiring process and get first-hand insights by hearing directly from our recruiters about what to expect. Apply with confidence today! Learn our recruiting process