Staff Data Engineer - Sr. Consultant level

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: 

This is an exceptional opportunity to join Visa’s Engineering and AI organization to design, scale, and optimize our large-scale data engineering and AI/ML infrastructure powering mission-critical products. As part of the Post Purchase Solutions team, you will lead the architecture and implementation of next-generation data pipelines, integrating structured and unstructured data across Hadoop and cloud-based systems (AWS/Azure) to unlock actionable insights and support intelligent decisioning models.
You will partner closely with AI/ML, product, and analytics teams to build secure, scalable, and high-performance data systems that fuel advanced AI models, insights generation, and data-driven automation. This role combines hands-on engineering excellence with architectural leadership to transform Visa’s post-purchase ecosystem into a data-first, AI-powered platform.

The Work itself: 

• Architect and Lead Data Solutions: Design and implement large-scale, distributed data systems integrating Hadoop, Apache Spark, Databricks, and cloud-native (AWS/Azure) services.
• Build Enterprise Data Pipelines: Develop robust ETL and streaming pipelines that handle large volumes of transactional and behavioral data, supporting machine learning and analytics workloads.
• Data Warehouse Modernization: Lead modernization of the Hadoop-based data warehouse, ensuring scalability, data quality, lineage, and governance standards are met.
• AI/ML Data Infrastructure: Collaborate with AI scientists to deliver data models optimized for ML pipelines, feature engineering, and model training using frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, and MCP.
• Insight Generation: Design and build reusable frameworks to extract, transform, and surface insights from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data sources (e.g., JSON, logs, events).
• Proof of Concept & Innovation: Lead POC initiatives to evaluate emerging technologies (Delta Lake, Iceberg, Kafka, Arrow, etc.) and translate findings into scalable production systems.
• Security & Compliance: Collaborate with InfoSec to ensure end-to-end data encryption, secure access, and compliance with Visa’s global data privacy standards.
• Mentorship & Leadership: Coach junior engineers and data scientists, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and innovation.
• Work closely with global data engineering team members across India and the US to ensure consistent design standards, alignment on architecture decisions, and high-quality delivery.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product management, AI, and platform teams to align engineering initiatives with business goals and long-term data strategy.

Essential Functions:

• Works directly with product owners to gather and refine requirements across products, adding and taking into account existing tools and solutions across the organization.
• Develops and designs 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 technical documentation of solutions and contributes to standard processes in technical documentation as needed.
• Plays a key role in the development and delivery of new features across products from end-to-end.

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
• Data Platform Expertise: Deep experience in Hadoop ecosystem, Apache Spark, Databricks, Airflow, Python, SQL, and Scala
• Builder: Experience building and deploying modern services and web applications with quality and scalability
• Learner: Constant drive to learn new technologies
• 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.

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