Chief SW Engineer

Visa; Foster City (CA); On-site; USD 231,000 - 369,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

On-site in Foster City

Job summary

Visa is seeking an experienced engineer to design, build, and operate production AI systems across the enterprise. This hands-on role sets architecture standards for agentic AI, generative apps, and ML platforms while ensuring security, compliance and production discipline in a payments environment.

You will lead flagship AI platforms, establish LLMOps practices, mentor engineers, and partner with risk, security and legal to scale responsible AI.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor's Degree or 9+ years with an Advanced degree or 15+ years total experience (as stated in qualifications).
• Demonstrated track record shipping AI/ML systems in production at enterprise scale.
• Deep fluency with modern generative AI stacks, RAG, vector search, tool-use and orchestration frameworks.
• Open-source contributions or internal platform adoption metrics are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define technical roadmap for AI software platforms and agentic capabilities.
• Architect, lead design and hands-on build of flagship agentic systems.
• Establish LLMOps/AIOps practices: evals, tracing, cost telemetry, drift detection, versioning, and SLOs.
• Set standards for AI-adjacent software: Python/TypeScript services, data pipelines, APIs, and IaC.
• Build and mentor senior engineers and AI tiger-team leads; act as player-coach on hard problems.
• Collaborate with security, privacy, risk, and legal to implement responsible AI controls in regulated environments.
• Drive build-vs-buy decisions on foundation models, vector stores, and evaluation tooling.
• Represent engineering in executive discussions; communicate risk and investment clearly.
• Stay current with frontier models while ensuring production fitness and cost control.

Skills

AI architecture & design

Production AI systems

Leadership & mentoring

Secure development

Regulated industry experience

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Python

TypeScript

Go

Job description

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

Position Description

The position is responsible for designing, building, and operationalizing production AI systems across the enterprise. This is a hands-on engineering role: you set architecture and engineering standards for agentic AI, generative applications, and ML platforms; you ship reference systems yourself; and you raise the quality bar for every team that builds on AI.

This role will be responsible for building the engineering system - platforms, patterns, evals, safety controls, reliability, cost, and developer experience - so business domains can adopt AI at speed with highest attention to security, compliance, and production discipline.

What you will drive:

• Enterprise AI software architecture: reference designs for LLM applications, multi-agent workflows, RAG/grounding, tool-use, and hybrid classical ML + GenAI systems.
• Production-grade AI platforms: shared services for model access, retrieval, evaluation, observability, prompt/version management, feature/store integration, and deployment.
• Agentic systems at scale: orchestration, memory, tool calling, human-in-the-loop controls, and safe autonomous workflows across business domains.
• Quality and safety system: evaluation harnesses, red-teaming, bias/privacy checks, policy enforcement, rollback, canary, and incident response for AI services.
• Developer experience for AI: SDKs, templates, CI/CD, golden paths, and inner-loop tooling so domain engineers can ship AI features without reinventing the stack.
• Technical strategy and standards: model selection, cost/latency tradeoffs, data contracts, API design, and architecture review for high-risk AI systems.
• Cross-domain enablement: partner with product, risk, compliance, legal, security, and domain engineering teams to take use cases from prototype to regulated production.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define the technical roadmap for AI software platforms and agentic capabilities, aligned to business outcomes.
• Architect, lead the design and hands on build flagship agentic systems.
• Establish LLMOps / AIOps practices: evals as tests, tracing, cost telemetry, drift detection, model and prompt versioning, and SLOs for AI services.
• Set coding, testing, and review standards for AI-adjacent software - Python and TypeScript services, APIs, data pipelines, and infrastructure as code.
• Build and mentor a high-leverage bench of staff/principal engineers and AI tiger-team leads; operate as player-coach on the hardest problems.
• Partner with security, privacy, risk, and legal to implement responsible AI controls that work in a regulated payments/fintech environment.
• Drive build-vs-buy decisions across foundation models, vector stores, orchestration frameworks, and evaluation tooling.
• Represent engineering in executive forums: translate technical risk, readiness, and investment into decisions leadership can act on.
• Stay current with frontier models and research, but filter aggressively for production fitness, vendor lock-in, and total cost of ownership.

Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Qualifications

Essential 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.
• Demonstrated track record shipping AI or ML systems that run in production at enterprise scale - not demos or isolated POCs.
• Deep fluency with modern generative AI stacks: foundation model APIs, RAG, vector search, tool-use / function calling, agent orchestration, and evaluation frameworks.
• Expert-level software craft: Python required; strong additional experience in at least one of TypeScript/Java/Go; rigorous testing, observability, and API design.
• Experience designing platforms used by other engineering teams (internal developer platforms, ML platforms, or equivalent).
• Strong systems thinking: latency, reliability, cost, data lineage, identity/auth, secrets, and failure modes of probabilistic systems.
• Proven ability to operate in a regulated industry (financial services, payments, healthcare, or similarly constrained environments).
• Excellent written and verbal communication with executives and with engineers; can write an architecture decision record and a board-ready risk brief.
• Bachelor's in Computer Science or related field required; Master's or equivalent depth preferred.
• Experience in payments, commerce, fraud/risk, identity, or large-scale transaction systems.
• Hands-on work with agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph or equivalent), MCP-style tool protocols, and multi-agent patterns.
• MLOps / LLMOps platform experience (feature stores, model registries, experiment tracking, online/offline eval pipelines).
• Prior ownership of AI governance engineering: policy-as-code, access minimization, PII handling, model cards, audit trails.
• Experience standing up forward-deployed or tiger-team models that embed with business domains.
• Open-source contributions, internal platform adoption metrics, or published technical writing that other engineers actually use.

Information for US Applicants

For roles located in the US, the estimated salary range for this position is $230,500.00 to $ 369,400.00 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.