Staff SW Engineer (10-12 years' exp - .NET Core / Backend Engineer with AI-First Development Approach)

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 Summary: We are seeking a talented and motivated Staff Software Engineer to join our VERA - Learning Enablement Technology team. As a key member of the team, you will play a critical role in developing cutting-edge solutions, leveraging innovative technologies, and enhancing the capabilities of our Value-Added Services (VAS) platform. You will be tasked to quickly grasp and evaluate new ideas and technologies from both internal and external sources and match them appropriately with emerging technology and business opportunities, building a culture of innovation and a drive for excellence. Essential functions Client-Focused Solutions Architect, design, build, and maintain distributed, AI-augmented enterprise software platforms across .NET Core / .NET Framework (C#), Python, Java, Go, and C++ runtimes. Translate business and product requirements into scalable, resilient system designs, and articulate architectural trade-offs (consistency vs. availability, latency vs. throughput, build vs. buy). Lead architectural design reviews, code-quality standards, and code reviews across the VAS Innovation & Learning portfolio. Troubleshoot complex production issues, drive root-cause analysis, and improve overall system reliability in alignment with Corporate Reliability Engineering (CRE) principles. Partner with product management, design, security, and infrastructure teams to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions. Contribute to automation, developer tooling, and Generative AI adoption across the engineering organization. Mentor, coach, and technically guide junior and mid-level software engineers - pairing on complex tasks, delivering structured code-review feedback, teaching system-design, data-structures, algorithms and design-patterns fundamentals, and onboarding new team members. Technology Modernization Design and implement Generative AI capabilities embedded in enterprise learning and analytics products, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, conversational learner-support agents, and Large Language Model (LLM) integrations with proprietary Visa data sources. Design, build, and integrate Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to expose Visa enterprise systems, APIs, knowledge repositories, and internal tools to AI agents under enterprise security controls (OAuth2.0, SSO, cryptographic key management). Design AI Agent-based applications using the Microsoft Agent Framework, including multi-agent orchestration, agent lifecycle management, tool invocation, autonomous workflow automation, and human-in-the-loop patterns implemented in accordance with the Agent-User Interaction (AG-UI) protocol. Design, author, and deploy Microsoft Declarative Agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot, including agent manifest authoring, instruction and capability definition, grounding against enterprise knowledge sources (SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Graph connectors, custom APIs), and integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility surfaces. Design and implement Experience API (xAPI)-based learner-tracking pipelines for real-time analytics and gamification, using Apache Kafka for event-driven ingestion, Redis for in-memory state, MongoDB for document persistence, and Snowflake for cloud analytical data warehousing feeding Minerva and VCA Knowledge Xchange. Adopt best-in-class AI/ML, data, and cloud technology solutions to expand platform capabilities. Process Improvement Continuously improve technology stacks, development processes, and methodologies to enhance productivity, quality, and time-to-market across the portfolio. Drive polyglot standards, shared libraries, and reusable platform components spanning using C#, Python, Cline, VATC Anthropic and Gpt Models. Engineering Excellence Perform large-scale system-design and architecture work, including capacity planning, latency and throughput modeling, partitioning and sharding strategies, consistency and availability trade-offs, caching hierarchies, and selection of appropriate data structures and algorithms (arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, hash maps, heaps, trees, tries, graphs, and probabilistic data structures such as Bloom filters). Apply object-oriented and enterprise software design patterns - creational (Factory, Builder, Singleton), structural (Adapter, Facade, Proxy, Decorator), behavioral (Strategy, Observer, Command, Chain of Responsibility), and distributed-system patterns (Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead, Saga, CQRS, Event Sourcing, Retry with Exponential Backoff) - to produce maintainable, testable, and extensible implementations. Develop and maintain modern web front ends and back-ends for and related SaaS applications using Angular, ReactJS, Node.js, Vue.js, Next.js, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and XML, integrated with RESTful APIs and web services. Design, deploy, and operate Azure-hosted cloud workloads across Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery models, including hybrid Windows/IIS environments, containerized workloads orchestrated with Docker and Kubernetes, and administrative automation implemented in PowerShell. Own release management and CI/CD pipelines for both application software and machine-learning model artifacts, implemented using Jenkins (including Groovy-based Jenkins pipeline libraries), GitHub Actions, and Git-based version control - covering automated build, test, security scanning, model-versioning, and progressive deployment stages. Design and author automated test suites across the testing pyramid - unit tests, integration tests, regression tests, smoke tests, end-to-end tests, and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) / WCAG accessibility tests - and integrate these into CI/CD quality gates. Apply enterprise security and Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC) practices, including cryptography fundamentals, authentication protocols (OAuth2.0, SSO), secure coding standards, and secure handling of AI/ML model inputs and outputs. Identify, triage, and remediate security vulnerabilities in the codebase using Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tooling such as Checkmarx, Software Composition Analysis (SCA) for third-party and open-source dependencies, and container image scanning; enforce code-quality standards through static analysis, coverage thresholds, and pre-merge quality gates. Write clean, maintainable code following established architecture and code governance principles. Proactively manage and reduce technical debt across the portfolio. Incident & Change Management Establish and enforce observability, monitoring, and incident-response practices using Grafana, Splunk, and ThousandEyes. Serve as release manager and provide on-call support for high-priority production incidents. Support incident, change, and problem management processes to ensure high availability and reliability. Participate in and lead root-cause analyses, blameless postmortems, and remediation tracking. This is a hybrid position. Hybrid employees can alternate time between both remote and office. Employees in hybrid roles are expected to work from the office 3 set days a week (determined by leadership/site), with a general guidepost of being in the office 50% or more of the time based on business needs. Qualifications Basic Qualifications: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field with 10+ years of relevant experience, or master’s degree with 8+ years. Expert-level skills in C# on .NET Core and .NET Framework, with hands-on experience delivering enterprise SaaS and hosted applications in production. Proficiency with AI/ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn) and data skills including large-dataset handling, preprocessing, feature engineering, and model evaluation. Experience building Generative AI and conversational AI applications, including RAG architectures, NLP techniques, and integration into enterprise systems. Familiarity with deep-learning concepts, including neural-network architectures and training procedures. Experience designing and developing AI Agent-based applications using the Microsoft Agent Framework, including multi-agent orchestration, agent lifecycle management, tool integration, and autonomous workflow automation. Experience designing, authoring, and deploying Microsoft Declarative Agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Strong understanding of the Agent-User Interaction (AG-UI) Protocol, with experience designing conversational experiences, agent communication patterns, context management, human-in-the-loop workflows, and user-centric AI interactions. Hands-on experience designing, building, and integrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers, enabling secure connectivity between AI agents, enterprise systems, APIs, knowledge repositories, and external tools. Anthropic Claude / applied-AI certification or equivalent demonstrated proficiency in building production applications on top of frontier Large Language Model APIs. Experience in multi-threading, concurrency handling, and advanced error management in enterprise-scale applications. Knowledge of version-control best practices for both software and ML models. Track record of integrating AI components into larger, distributed enterprise systems. Proven server-side development experience in Python (including AI/ML workloads), Java, Go (Golang), and C++. Strong experience in web application and full-stack development, including modern UI frameworks (Angular, ReactJS, Node.js, Vue.js, next.js), JavaScript, HTML/CSS/XML, and integration with RESTful APIs and web services. Strong background in enterprise architecture and large-scale system design - designing and deploying highly available, resilient, distributed systems with in-memory computing (Redis), event-driven streaming (Apache Kafka), and both SQL and NoSQL data stores including Microsoft SQL Server and MongoDB. Hands-on experience with cloud data warehousing and analytics using Snowflake. Hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure across Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery models. Strong applied knowledge of core data structures and algorithms (arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, hash maps, heaps, trees, tries, graphs, probabilistic data structures) and analysis of time and space complexity. Demonstrated fluency with object-oriented and enterprise software design patterns (creational, structural, behavioral, and distributed-system patterns). Hands-on expertise in DevOps tools (Docker, Jenkins with Groovy-based pipeline scripting, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and release management best practices for both software and ML models. Windows Server and Internet Information Services (IIS) administration and automation scripting using PowerShell. Demonstrated experience designing and authoring automated tests across the testing pyramid - unit, integration, regression, smoke, end-to-end, and ADA/WCAG accessibility tests - and integrating them into CI/CD quality gates. Skilled in monitoring, logging, and observability tools (Grafana, Splunk, ThousandEyes) and committed to clean code, clean architecture, and proactive technical-debt management. Working knowledge of enterprise security, authentication protocols (OAuth2.0, SSO), SSDLC practices, and cryptography fundamentals. Demonstrated experience identifying, triaging, and remediating security vulnerabilities using Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools such as Checkmarx, Software Composition Analysis (SCA), and container image scanning. Demonstrated experience mentoring, coaching, and technically guiding junior and mid-level software engineers. Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively in agile environments across geographies and time zones, with strong communication and influence skills. Preferred Qualifications: Deep expertise in context management for AI/agent development, including prompt engineering, context-window optimization, short-term/long-term memory design, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tuning, semantic caching, and context isolation across multi-agent workflows. Experience using Claude Code (Anthropic's agentic coding CLI) and comparable AI coding agents in distributed-systems and enterprise-scale engineering workflows, including multi-repository refactoring, incident triage and remediation, and CI/CD integration. Familiarity with Spec-Kit-driven development (GitHub Spec Kit / specification-first workflows) for AI-assisted software engineering, including specification authoring, spec-driven code generation, and iterative refinement with AI coding agents. Anthropic Claude / applied-AI certification or equivalent demonstrated proficiency in building production applications on top of frontier Large Language Model APIs. Experience building interactive business-intelligence dashboards and reports using Microsoft Power BI Proficiency with Bruno (or equivalent open-source API clients such as Postman/Insomnia) for API design, testing, and collaboration on RESTful, GraphQL, and gRPC endpoints, including versioned collections, environment management, and automated contract tests. Experience designing, operating, and hardening enterprise Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) infrastructure for large-file exchange across distributed servers, including key-based authentication, PGP/GPG encryption, transfer retry/resume, throughput optimization, and audit logging. Advanced container-orchestration expertise beyond baseline usage, including Kubernetes operator and Custom Resource Definition (CRD) authoring, Helm chart authoring, service-mesh integration, and Docker image hardening, multi-stage builds, and rootless container security. Hands-on experience with Oracle Database (Oracle Server), including PL/SQL development, query and index tuning, and integration with .NET, Java, and Python workloads. Hands-on experience with Teradata enterprise data-warehouse platform, including Teradata SQL, workload management, and performance tuning for large-scale analytical workloads. Experience integrating with enterprise ticketing and IT service-management platforms, including Pega and ServiceNow, for incident, change, problem, and workflow automation. Hands-on experience applying both symmetric-key encryption/decryption (AES-256 in GCM/CBC modes with authenticated encryption and secure IV/key handling) and asymmetric-key encryption/decryption (RSA-2048/4096, Elliptic Curve Cryptography with P-256/P-384) for confidentiality, integrity, digital signatures, key exchange (RSA-OAEP, ECDH), and hybrid encryption schemes, including secure key generation, rotation, and storage in enterprise key-management systems (Azure Key Vault, HSM-backed stores). Experience of integrating AI components into larger, distributed enterprise systems. 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.