Chief Software Engineer (Hands-On AI Engineering Leader)

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 is a global payments technology company operating at massive scale across more than 200 countries and territories, with CMS serving as a strategic growth area focused on commercial payments and money movement solutions. Role Overview Visa is seeking a highly technical, hands-on Chief Software Engineer to help lead the next generation of AI-enabled commercial payments and money movement platforms within Commercial and Money Movement Solutions (CMS). This leader will architect and build large-scale cloud-native systems, drive technical direction across teams, and apply GenAI to both product innovation and engineering productivity. What you will do: Lead the architecture, design, and development of highly scalable, secure, API-centric distributed systems supporting B2B payables, commercial solutions, and money movement products. Remain hands-on in building core platform components, services, and engineering patterns rather than operating solely at the strategy layer. Drive technical leadership across teams by establishing software development standards, reusable frameworks, integration patterns, and platform best practices. Partner closely with product, architecture, and engineering leaders to shape the technical roadmap for next-generation CMS solutions. Build and evolve cloud-native services with strong emphasis on scalability, resilience, observability, security, and maintainability. Lead the adoption of GenAI capabilities across the organization, including AI-native product functionality, intelligent automation, and developer productivity use cases. Design and implement agentic and workflow-driven systems that leverage modern AI capabilities in practical, production-ready environments. Mentor senior engineers and help raise the technical bar across the organization through design leadership, code quality, and engineering excellence. Influence enterprise-level technology choices, deployment patterns, and platform strategy in alignment with Visa engineering principles. Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days 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 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 12+ years of software engineering experience, including deep hands-on experience building large-scale backend or platform systems. Proven expertise in distributed systems design, cloud-native architecture, and highly scalable service development. Strong experience building production-grade platforms and services rather than only designing them at a conceptual level. Demonstrated hands-on experience with GenAI, including AI-native applications, workflow orchestration, intelligent automation, or agent-based systems. Strong understanding of modern service architectures, including microservices, APIs, containers, caching, security, and platform integration patterns. Ability to influence technical direction across teams while remaining close to implementation and execution. Experience using AI to improve engineering productivity, product capabilities, or platform intelligence. Strong engineering judgment across reliability, latency, scale, maintainability, and security. Experience with Java and modern backend frameworks such as Spring; however, strong system-building expertise is more important than any single programming language. Experience with REST, gRPC, shared services, container technologies, API gateways, DevOps, observability, and infrastructure automation. Background in payments, fintech, money movement, or other high-scale transaction environments is a plus. Experience working in environments where compliance, security, and global scale are critical. Information for US Applicants For roles located in the US, the estimated salary range for this position is $195,800.00 to $ 313,500.00 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. 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 protect veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.