Lead Solutions Architect

Visas Technology Organization is a community of problem solvers and innovators reshaping the future of commerce. We operate one of the worlds most sophisticated global transaction networksprocessing more than 65000 secure transactions per second across 80 million merchants 15000 financial institutions and billions of people worldwide. As part of our AIFirst Innovation team you will help define and deliver transformative intelligencedriven products that unlock new payment experiences new business flows and new capabilities across Visas ecosystem.

The Opportunity

We are seeking a versatile curious and impactdriven Lead Solutions Architect who thrives at the intersection of AI distributed systems and largescale customer this role you will lead the execution of nextgeneration AIpowered solutionspartnering closely with engineering data science design security and business stakeholders. You will steward development from ideation to scaled deployment guiding teams to build intelligent resilient and trustworthy systems that serve Visas global network.

The Work Itself

 Translate complex business challenges into clear engineering roadmaps user requirements and technical specifications that enable breakthrough innovation across payment flows fraud intelligence data products and realtime commerce platforms.

 Lead the experimentation pipeline evaluating new technologies model types LLMbased features and platform capabilitiesand guiding teams through proofofconcepts pilots and scaled launches.

 Implement innovations for AInative capabilities that touch 40% of the worlds population setting new standards for scalability security explainability and reusability.

 Drive crossfunctional collaboration ensuring model developers platform engineers UX teams and product partners align on architecture capabilities and success metrics.

 Champion product quality and operational resilience identifying systemic patterns across data model performance bugs and user frictionand driving durable solutions.

 Shape Visas nextgeneration AI ecosystem leveraging cloudnative and modern AI/ML technologies to build robust privacypreserving and globally scalable services.

 Enable global impact mentoring teams developing best practices and contributing to internal learning programs to elevate Visas AI maturity and experimentation culture.

Essential Functions

Provide deep technical leadership across AI data platforms and largescale distributed systemsdirecting strategy for how requirements are collected evaluated and transformed into decisive product direction.

Lead structured discovery with product engineering and business stakeholders to recommend architectures model integration patterns and scalable design strategies.

Establish and maintain standards for responsible AI including data quality model testing explainability observability and endtoend governance.

Lead planning and implementation for new AI capabilities and intelligent features ensuring seamless integration into Visas global platforms and customer experiences.

Analyze performance patterns customer signals and model behavior to implement systemic improvements and longterm product enhancements.
The Skills You Bring

 AIfirst mindsetcuriosity experimentation and a passion for applying intelligent technologies to solve global-scale problems.

 Product leadership with technical depth including experience driving ML data cloud or highlydistributed system products.

 Ability to challenge the status quo with comfort ideating beyond traditional solutions and guiding teams through ambiguity.

 Understanding of modern engineering and ML stacks including familiarity with languages and frameworks such as Python Java C containers Kubernetes LLM APIs vector databases and realtime data systems.

 Experience shipping modern products with a focus on scalability reliability and measurable customer value.

 Continuous learning mindset staying current with emerging AI technologies MLOps patterns and modelbased product architectures.

 Strong crossfunctional collaboration working closely with Product Engineering Data Science UX DevOps and Agile/Scrum teams.
 

This is a hybrid position. Onsite expectations will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

Qualifications :

Basic Qualifications:

• 12 or more years of work experience with a Bachelors Degree or at least 10 years of work experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters/ MBA/JD/MD) or at least 8 years of work experience with a PhD

Preferred Qualifications:

• 15 or more years of work experience with a Bachelors Degree or 12 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters MBA JD MD) or 6 years of work experience with a PhD.
• 10 years of experience in solutions architecture platform engineering technical product leadership or systems design roles with direct ownership of large-scale customer-facing platforms.
• 5 years of hands-on experience designing and deploying AI/ML-powered systems including model integration into production services (e.g. fraud detection risk scoring personalization decisioning systems or real-time intelligence platforms).
• Proven experience leading architecture and delivery of distributed cloud-native systems at global scale including high-throughput low-latency environments.
• Strong background in AI platform architecture including one or more of the following:
  • LLM-enabled applications (prompting orchestration retrieval-augmented generation)
  • Feature stores model serving or inference pipelines
  • Real-time data processing and streaming architectures
• Demonstrated expertise with cloud platforms (AWS Azure or GCP) including:
  • Kubernetes-based deployment models
  • Service mesh observability and reliability patterns
  • Secure multi-region highly available architectures
• Experience establishing or influencing Responsible AI and governance practices including data quality standards model validation explainability bias evaluation monitoring and auditability.
• Strong understanding of MLOps and production AI lifecycle management including CI/CD for models model versioning automated testing performance monitoring and rollback strategies.
• Prior experience in regulated or high-trust domains (payments fintech banking healthcare identity or security-sensitive platforms) is strongly preferred.
• Track record of leading cross-functional technical initiatives influencing senior engineering data science and product leaders without direct authority.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers architects or data scientists and contributing to technical standards design reviews or internal enablement programs.

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 this position is $173100 to $276800 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 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.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time