Senior Manager; Software 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 Visa’s Technology Organization is a community of problem solvers and innovators reshaping the future of commerce. We operate the world’s most sophisticated processing networks capable of handling more than 65k secure transactions a second across 80M merchants, 15k Financial Institutions, and billions of everyday people. While working with us you’ll get to work on complex distributed systems and solve massive scale problems centered on new payment flows, business and data solutions, cyber security, and B2C platforms. The Opportunity: We are looking for Versatile, curious, and energetic Software Engineers who embrace solving complex challenges on a global scale. As a Visa Software Engineer, you will be an integral part of a multi-functional development team inventing, designing, building, and testing software products that reach a truly global customer base. While building components of powerful payment technology, you will get to see your efforts shaping the digital future of monetary transactions. The Work itself: Design code and systems that touch 40% of the world population while influencing Visa’s internal standards for scalability, security, and reusability Collaborate multi-functionally to create design artifacts and develop best-in-class software solutions for multiple Visa technical offerings Actively contribute to product quality improvements, valuable service technology, and new business flows in diverse agile squads Develop robust and scalable products intended for a myriad of customers including end-user merchants, b2b, and business to government solutions. Leverage innovative technologies to build the next generation of Payment Services, Transaction Platforms, Real-Time Payments, and Buy Now Pay Later Technology Opportunities to make a difference on a global or local scale through mentorship and continued learning opportunities Essential Functions: Works with product owners to gather and refine requirements for one product, adding and taking into account existing tools and solutions across departments. Develops and designs moderately advanced architect solutions that are robust and scalable, considering integrations with other solutions across the internal technical ecosystem. Provides domain expertise on the development of user documentation of solutions and implements standard processes in user documentation. Plays a significant role in the development and delivery of new features within a product from end-to-end. This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in the office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager. Qualifications Basic Qualifications: 8+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 5 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 2 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 11+ years of relevant work experience. Preferred Qualifications: 9 or more years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor Degree or 7 or more relevant years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 3 or more years of experience with a PhD We're seeking a Senior Manager of Engineering with 12+ years of total experience (including 3+ years in a people management role) who combines deep technical mastery in Java, Distributed Systems, and AI-First engineering with proven people leadership to build, grow, and inspire high-performing engineering teams. You will drive technical strategy, foster an AI-first culture, and partner with product and business leadership to deliver globally-scaled, intelligent systems. Education & Experience 12+ years of total software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in a direct people management role Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Distributed Systems, or related field Demonstrated track record of leading engineering teams of 6–9+ engineers across multiple levels (junior through senior/staff) People Management & Leadership Skills Proven ability to recruit, hire, and onboard engineering talent across all levels (junior, senior, staff, and principal engineers) Experience designing and executing structured interview processes and calibration sessions to ensure consistent, bias-aware hiring decisions Skill in identifying skills gaps across the team and building development plans to address them Track record of growing engineers into senior and staff roles through targeted mentorship and stretch assignments Ability to build a team culture that attracts and retains diverse, high-caliber engineering talent Performance Management Experience running effective performance review cycles: setting expectations, delivering feedback, calibrating ratings, and handling performance improvement plans when needed Ability to differentiate performance across a team and make fair, documented compensation and promotion decisions Skill in providing timely, specific, and constructive feedback — both reinforcing and redirecting — in a psychologically safe environment Experience managing underperformance with empathy and clear accountability, including difficult conversations Ability to set clear, measurable individual and team goals aligned to business and technical objectives Career Development & Coaching Strong coaching skills to help engineers identify career goals and create actionable development plans Experience sponsoring engineers for high-visibility projects, promotions, and leadership opportunities Ability to identify and cultivate tech leads and future managers from within the team Skill in facilitating 1:1s that go beyond status updates: career conversations, motivation, blockers, and personal growth Experience building mentorship and buddy programs to accelerate onboarding and knowledge transfer Core Technical Skills Java & Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep hands-on background in Java, Spring, Hibernate with an ability to guide architectural trade-offs at the engineering level Strong understanding of advanced Java development: concurrency, multithreading, performance optimization, and JVM tuning Expertise in distributed system architectures: microservices, event-driven design, service mesh, and distributed consensus (Raft, Paxos) Deep knowledge of distributed data management patterns: CQRS, Event Sourcing, Saga, and eventual consistency Experience with distributed caching (Redis, Hazelcast, Memcached) and streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pulsar) Understanding of CAP theorem and distributed transaction management applied at enterprise scale Experience building and leading teams that deliver highly available, fault-tolerant systems with disaster recovery Working knowledge of service discovery, load balancing, and circuit breaker patterns across large deployments Familiarity with major Java IDEs (IntelliJ, Eclipse) and core tooling: GIT/Stash, Maven, Jenkins Strong background in API Development using REST, SOAP, JSON, and XML Deep knowledge of API security standards: OAuth, SAML, JWT Experience overseeing teams building GraphQL, gRPC, and modern API gateway solutions Understanding of API versioning, rate limiting, and distributed API lifecycle management Background with async/reactive APIs using Spring WebFlux or equivalent AI-First Engineering Skills: Ability to evaluate and champion AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cline, or similar) Hands-on familiarity with LLM integration and serving at scale (OpenAI API, Azure OpenAI, Claude, Llama, etc.) The Skills You Bring: Energy and Experience: A growth mindset that is curious and passionate about technologies and enjoys challenging projects on a global scale Challenge the Status Quo: Comfort in pushing the boundaries, ‘hacking’ beyond traditional solutions Language Expertise: Expertise in one or more general development languages (e.g., Java, C#, C++) Builder: Experience building and deploying modern services and web applications with quality and scalability Learner: Constant drive to learn new technologies such as Angular, React, Kubernetes, Docker, etc. Partnership: Experience collaborating with Product, Test, Dev-ops, and Agile/Scrum teams We do not expect that any single candidate would fulfill all of these characteristics. For instance, we have exciting team members who are really focused on building scalable systems but didn’t work with payments technology or web applications before joining Visa. 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.