Sr. Director - Software Engineering

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 Visas 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.

Qualifications

• 18+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelors 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.