Principal Data Engineer- Data as a Service

Company Description

Visa is a world leader in payments and technology, with over 259 billion payments transactions flowing safely between consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government entities in more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable, and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive while driven by a common purpose – to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

Make an impact with a purpose-driven industry leader. Join us today and experience Life at Visa.

Job Description

The Data and Artificial Intelligence Platform (DAP) is a critical component of Visa's Technology organization, providing the essential technology and processes to manage Visa's extensive data and AI assets and deliver valuable intelligence, products, and services to customers.  Within DAP, the Data as a Service (DaaS) team consists of skilled data engineers focused on building data pipelines to meet Visa's data needs and delivers secure, high-quality, and easy-to-use Visa core data assets.

We are seeking a Principal Data Engineer who will play a crucial role in developing next-generation enterprise-level data pipelines for Real Time and Batch Data ingestion and processing, incorporating Agentic AI to support Visa's 2030 strategy. This individual should be a versatile, curious, and energetic technology leader with expertise and experience in architecting, designing and delivering enterprise level Big Data solutions and services.  In this role, you will collaborate with business partners, project managers, data engineers, and operations across the company to tackle complex, high-impact data-related initiatives on a global scale.  You will be responsible for executing a data strategy that leverages our data assets to drive innovation through data engineering and GenAI framework.  You will also guide and mentor junior engineers, ensuring security, scalability, performance, and reliability in all data solutions. As an individual contributor based in Foster City, California, USA you will be reporting to Sr. Director of Data as a Service (DaaS) team. This team is growing fast! Join us and be an integral part of the group that is at the leading edge of pioneering Data and AI.

What We Offer:

• Exciting Challenges: We work at a scale rarely seen in the industry, solving complex data and AI problems across the entire stack, offering limitless opportunities to leverage and lead in this ever-growing field.
• Teamwork and Fun: Each of us brings diverse and rich experiences to the team, enabling us to deliver much more than the sum of our parts and have fun at the same time.
• Fantastic People: With strong leadership, you will have the opportunity to lead, collaborate, and deliver together with some of the best and most creative minds in the industry.

Essential Functions:

• Oversee the entire data lifecycle, from data acquisition and ingestion to transformation, storage, and analysis for both streaming and batch data pipelines.
• Lead architecture, design, and development of highly scalable and reliable data engineering solutions.
• Ensure data security, privacy, governance, and compliance with all relevant regulations, and develop and implement auditable policies and procedures.
• Future-proof data architecture for the payment processing pipelines that aligns with the product vision and accelerates innovation and time to market.
• Actively contribute with hands on development to critical projects by developing reusable modules, core frameworks and automation tools.
• Establish engineering best practices for application development, testing, deployment and monitoring.
• Leverage AI/ML technologies in bringing productivity across the SDLC phases.
• Champion the adoption of GenAI and Agentic AI technologies and develop strategies to integrate them into existing data pipeline workflows or develop new ones
• Provide technology leadership and motivate a high performing team of data engineers through coaching and mentoring and elevate team talent expertise fostering a culture of innovation and continuous learning.
• Collaborate with business partners to convert product requirements into high quality solutions that comply with all non-functional requirements, including security, scalability, availability, and reliability.
• Effectively communicate technical strategy and engineering solutions to leadership and business stakeholder
• Adhere to Visa's Leadership Principles by promoting collaboration, encouraging constructive debate, and executing with excellence.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:
•12 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 10 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters/MBA /JD/MD), or a minimum of 5 years of work experience with a PhD.

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.
• Proven track record of building and deploying complex architectures for streaming and batch ETL pipelines using the latest Big Data technologies.
• Strong hands on proficiency in programming languages like Java, Scala, SQL, and Python.
• Expertise with Apache Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Hive, Trino, Presto, Apache Airflow and NoSQL databases like HBase and Cassendra.
• Experience in on-prem (Hadoop) and cloud-based data platforms (AWS, Azure, DataBricks) and related data storage (HDFS, S3) and processing tools (Spark).
• Experience developing proper metrics instrumentation in software components using Prometheus, Grafana for monitoring, logging, auditing, and security implementation to help facilitate real-time and remote problem solving /performance monitoring is highly preferred.
• Experience in deployment with automated and scalable CI/CD tools, including Jenkins and Maven.
• Exposure with GenAI or Agentic AI technologies (e.g., Large Language Models, NLP) and RAG-based architecture and vector databases.
• Experience with containerization technologies and orchestration tools, including Docker and Kubernetes preferred.

Additional Information

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 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.

Visa will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable local law, including the requirements of Article 49 of the San Francisco Police Code.

U.S. APPLICANTS ONLY: The estimated salary range for a new hire into this position is 215,200.00 to 312,350.00 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.