Director of AI Engineering

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 Role Summary We are seeking a hands-on Director of Cybersecurity AI Product Development to build and lead a newly formed product engineering team focused on developing AI agent products for cybersecurity use cases. This is a technical leadership role for an AI-native, security-minded product engineering leader who can both manage a high-performing team and personally contribute as a lead engineer / architect. The role is expected to be approximately 50% hands-on individual contribution and 50% people management. The successful candidate will be responsible for hiring and leading a new team of approximately six product engineers, AI engineers, security engineers, and solution-oriented technical specialists. The team will design, build, and scale cybersecurity AI agent products that help customers detect, investigate, prioritize, and respond to cyber threats. This role requires deep practical experience in agentic AI systems, including structured agent memory, reasoning loops, context orchestration, retrieval and knowledge management, tool use, workflow automation, and secure deployment patterns. The candidate must also bring strong knowledge of cybersecurity principles, secure engineering best practices, identity systems, cloud infrastructure, APIs, CI/CD pipelines, and distributed services. About the Team You will establish and lead a new product development team responsible for building cybersecurity AI agents that operate across real-world enterprise environments. The team will collaborate with other global teams to work at the intersection of: Agentic AI product development Security automation and orchestration AI guardrails and governance Behavior analytics and threat monitoring The role is suited for a leader who is comfortable operating in ambiguity, defining technical direction from first principles, and building both the team and the product foundation from the ground up. This mirrors expectations seen in leading AI product roles where candidates are expected to own products from early concept through production adoption and solve customer problems through technically deep execution. Key Responsibilities: Build and Lead a New High-Performance Team: Hire, onboard, and lead a new team of approximately six engineers and technical specialists within the first three months. Define team structure, roles, operating model, engineering rituals, and delivery cadence. Coach engineers on technical excellence, secure development, AI-native engineering practices, and product-minded execution. Create a high-accountability, high-trust culture focused on shipping reliable, secure, and measurable product outcomes. Set performance expectations, provide feedback, conduct reviews, and support career development. Lead Hands-On Product and Engineering Development: Personally contribute to product architecture, system design, code review, prototyping, and production implementation. Be able to function as a lead engineer / principal architect for critical components of the cybersecurity AI agent platform. Review and approve technical designs, architecture decisions, code changes, and security-sensitive implementations. Develop and maintain high engineering standards across code quality, observability, scalability, testability, and security. Partner with product, design, sales engineering, customer success, and security teams to translate real-world customer problems into scalable technical solutions. Drive proof-of-concept development, MVP delivery, production hardening, and continuous product iteration. Deliver Scalable, Production-Grade Solutions: Lead the delivery of scalable, reliable, and maintainable cybersecurity AI products. Define technical roadmaps aligned with customer needs, market opportunities, and business priorities. Drive end-to-end delivery across discovery, design, prototyping, implementation, testing, release, monitoring, and iteration. Establish metrics for product quality, model performance, agent reliability, security effectiveness, customer adoption, and operational impact. Ensure systems are designed for high availability, observability, resilience, and enterprise-grade deployment. Collaborate with stakeholders to support customer pilots, production deployments, technical demos, and executive-level product discussions. Work with other product partners at Visa to drive the commercialization of internally developed AI security products. Drive AI-Native Transformation and Automation: Demonstrate daily, practical use of AI tools to improve personal productivity, team velocity, software delivery, product design, documentation, testing, and operational efficiency. Establish AI-native engineering practices across the team, including AI-assisted coding, automated testing, documentation generation, threat modeling, security review support, and product analytics. Identify gaps, inefficiencies, and repetitive workflows, then solve them through automation, AI agents, tooling, or process redesign. Build internal accelerators, developer tools, evaluation frameworks, and reusable AI components. Promote a culture of experimentation, rapid learning, and measurable productivity gains through AI. Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager. Qualifications Required Qualifications: Advanced degree in Computer Science or other related fields 10+ years of experience in AI research, software engineering, security engineering, AI product engineering, solution engineering, or related technical roles. 3+ years of experience managing high-performing technical teams, preferably in product development, cybersecurity, AI/ML, cloud infrastructure, or enterprise software. Proven ability to hire, lead, coach, and retain strong engineering talent. Ability to operate as both a hands-on technical contributor and a people manager. Demonstrated experience leading teams through ambiguity, rapid change, and high technical complexity. Deep hands-on experience with modern AI technologies, especially agentic AI systems. Practical understanding of: LLM application architecture Agent planning and reasoning loops Structured memory Context management Retrieval-augmented generation Tool calling and function orchestration Knowledge management AI evaluation frameworks Guardrails and safety controls Prompt injection and AI-specific security risks Knowledge of common threats and exploits. Strong hands-on experience building modern software systems. Preferred Qualifications: Experience building or leading development of cybersecurity products, AI security products, SOC automation tools, SIEM/SOAR integrations, cloud security products, endpoint security products, or identity security solutions. Experience with containerization, infrastructure as code, secrets management, and cloud security best practices is preferred. Experience with autonomous or semi-autonomous AI agents in production environments. Experience securing AI systems, LLM applications, or agentic workflows. Familiarity with frameworks or tools such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, CrewAI, vector databases, knowledge graphs, or equivalent agent orchestration technologies. Familiarity with model evaluation, monitoring, observability, feedback loops, and continuous improvement of AI systems. Experience with cloud-native security services across AWS and Azure. Familiarity with enterprise security frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, OWASP, CIS Controls, or ISO 27001. Experience with AI evaluation, red teaming, adversarial testing, or safety guardrails. 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.