Lead SW Engineer

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 Job Summary: The Acceptance Solutions Product Development team is responsible for a portfolio of products that diversify Visa’s revenue, differentiate our network, and deliver value-added solutions across payment rails. As part of Visa’s broader strategy to increase total merchant value, the team develops solutions that address complex and emerging needs for merchants and acquirers, while helping clients navigate the evolving digital commerce landscape with greater flexibility, resilience, and agility. The goal of the Visa Acceptance Platform is to be the world’s most open payment acceptance platform by delivering market-leading, globally relevant, omnichannel acceptance capabilities through open, composable, modular APIs built with Visa-grade resilience, security, maintainability, and scale. We are seeking a hands-on technical leader to lead the architecture, design, and evolution of Search and Analytics capabilities across the Visa Acceptance Platform. The ideal candidate brings deep hands-on experience in distributed systems, high-throughput data processing, search platforms, analytics pipelines, event-driven architecture, secure software design, and modern user interface technologies. This person will be expected to remain close to day-to-day engineering execution, including architecture decisions, design reviews, code reviews, debugging, production readiness, operational troubleshooting, and technical mentoring across both backend and frontend engineering domains. This role will help shape how Visa Acceptance Platform captures, enriches, indexes, searches, analyzes, secures, visualizes, and operationalizes transaction and platform data at scale. The candidate should be comfortable working across payments, analytics, search, user experience, security, cloud-native platforms, AI/ML-enabled engineering practices, and mission-critical production environments. Essential Functions: Serve as the hands-on technical lead for Payment Processing Platform  across the Visa Acceptance Platform, providing technical direction across architecture, design, implementation, scalability, resiliency, and operational readiness. Design and evolve secure, reliable, and scalable search, indexing, analytics, enrichment, and data-processing capabilities that support high-volume payment acceptance use cases. Provide technical leadership for modern, intuitive, secure, and performant user interfaces that enable search, analytics, reporting, operational insights, and data-driven workflows for internal and external users. Remain actively hands-on with architecture, design reviews, code reviews, proof-of-concepts, performance analysis, debugging, technical troubleshooting, and production-readiness decisions on a day-to-day basis. Set technical direction for event-driven data flows, transaction enrichment, search indexing, analytics pipelines, user-facing dashboards, observability, and operational insights in alignment with product, platform, security, user experience, and business objectives. Lead technical design for event correlation, transaction matching, retry handling, dead-letter queues, replay, idempotency, exactly-once processing considerations, and high-throughput data movement. Partner with application, data, platform, product, security, privacy, risk, governance, and operations teams to deliver solutions that meet functional and non-functional requirements, including security, latency, availability, compliance, and maintainability. Apply AI/ML, Generative AI, automation, and intelligent engineering practices to improve software delivery, search relevance, analytics capabilities, operational insight, developer productivity, and business outcomes. Mentor senior engineers and technical leads through design reviews, architecture discussions, hands-on problem solving, technical deep dives, brown bag sessions, and production troubleshooting. Communicate technical strategy, tradeoffs, risks, dependencies, and recommendations clearly to executive leaders, product partners, architecture forums, and engineering teams. Drive engineering improvements that strengthen reliability, performance, observability, maintainability, developer productivity, and operational excellence across Search and Analytics capabilities. Influence technical strategy across teams without relying on formal reporting authority, using strong engineering judgment, collaboration, credibility, and hands-on technical depth. Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager. Qualifications Basic Qualifications: 10+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 7 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 4 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 13+ years of relevant work experience. Preferred Qualifications: 12 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or 8-10 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 6+ years of work experience with a PhD. Demonstrated track record as a hands-on technical leader with organization-wide or platform-wide impact. Deep expertise designing, building, and scaling mission-critical distributed systems that require high availability, scalability, resiliency, security, and operational excellence. Proven ability to solve complex techn