Sr. Director- Software Development (Global Network Engineering)

About this role

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

The Opportunity: 

The Sr. Director role in the Global Network Engineering organization entails end-to-end ownership of the strategy, architecture, technology selection, software development, and ongoing evolution of the infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform supporting Visa’s entire multi-vendor networking portfolio. This ownership includes defining the framework for network device configuration generation and management; leading the development team responsible for Visa’s internally developed IaC network configuration platform, while contributing code personally; and partnering with stakeholders across a diverse set of organizations, including Engineering, Operations, Cybersecurity, and Client Services.  

The IaC platform is a mission-critical engineering system that automates engineering and operations workflows, enables self-service capabilities across the organization, and serves as a foundational platform for GenAI and agentic AI adoption. A successful candidate will bring deep software engineering leadership experience, a strong platform engineering mindset, hands-on development expertise, and the ability to drive technical innovation, organizational transformation, and execution at scale.  

The Work Itself: 

Develop and execute comprehensive platform engineering and network automation strategies and roadmaps, ensuring alignment with business objectives and elevating operational reliability and efficiency. The scope includes all networking at Visa -   over 10,000 network devices from vendors such as Arista Networks, Cisco Systems, and Juniper Networks used in both data center and WAN environments, including multiple SD-WAN technologies.  

Write code and lead a geographically distributed software engineering and DevOps team responsible for a mission-critical IaC platform that serves as the single source of truth and is essential to configuring and managing Visa’s production networks at industry-leading levels of availability. The IaC system itself must employ high-availability techniques and operate in an always-on fashion.  

Function as the executive leader for network automation, platform engineering, and IaC initiatives, partnering with Cybersecurity and cross-functional engineering and operations teams to define priorities, direction, and implementation timelines.  

Lead the evaluation, selection, and deployment of new technologies and vendors, including containerized automation platforms, ML-driven anomaly detection, GenAI capabilities, and event-driven remediation systems.  

Serve as a technical leader for software-driven network automation environments, including Python frameworks, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, containerized microservices, and AI-enabled operational workflows.  

Set technical direction for architecture, engineering, and delivery of complex, enterprise-wide automation solutions supporting multi-vendor network environments.  

Lead cross-functional and external collaboration projects, managing strategic partnerships with both internal stakeholders and external vendors.  

Drive adoption of industry best practices for software engineering, code quality, security, performance monitoring, reliability engineering, and platform operations.  

Establish and enforce robust software development processes including coding standards, test-driven development, code reviews, and comprehensive CI/CD pipelines.  

Ensure change management and compliance with information security standards across all automation initiatives.  

Lead GenAI adoption in the organization and evolve the IaC platform into a foundational engineering platform that enables agentic AI use cases across Network Engineering.  

Inspire, mentor, and lead high-performing teams of software engineers, platform engineers, and network specialists to deliver operational excellence and continuous improvement.  

Set clear priorities and goals (OKRs) and foster a culture of innovation, service reliability, engineering excellence, and accountability.  

Monitor and evaluate team performance and coach for growth.  

Build strong relationships with business leaders, stakeholders, and operations teams, advocating for their needs and incorporating feedback.  

Visa requires at least 3 days in office; expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager. Visa will accept applications for this role until at least August 21, 2026.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications: 

• 12+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree, OR 15+ years of relevant work experience.  

Preferred Qualifications:  • 15 or more years of experience with a Bachelor's Degree or 12 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g., Master's, MBA, JD, or MD), or PhD with 9+ years of experience.   • Experience leading geographically distributed software engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or network engineering teams.   • Demonstrated success architecting, building, and operating enterprise-scale software platforms, automation systems, developer infrastructure, or IaC solutions.   • Experience with network telemetry systems, time-series databases, real-time analytics, and AI/ML-driven operational insights.   • Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools (Ansible, Terraform, etc.).   • Experience mentoring and developing software engineers, platform engineers, DevOps engineers, and network specialists.

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