Lead Solutions Architect

Visa’s Technology Organization is a community of problem solvers and innovators reshaping the future of commerce. We operate one of the world’s most sophisticated global transaction networks—processing more than 65,000 secure transactions per second across 80 million merchants, 15,000 financial institutions, and billions of people worldwide. As part of our AI‑First Innovation team, you will help define and deliver transformative intelligence‑driven products that unlock new payment experiences, new business flows, and new capabilities across Visa’s ecosystem.

The Opportunity

We are seeking a versatile, curious, and impact‑driven Lead Solutions Architect who thrives at the intersection of AI, distributed systems, and large‑scale customer impact. In this role, you will lead the execution of next‑generation AI‑powered solutions—partnering 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 Visa’s 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 real‑time commerce platforms.

• Lead the experimentation pipeline, evaluating new technologies, model types, LLM‑based features, and platform capabilities—and guiding teams through proof‑of‑concepts, pilots, and scaled launches.

• Implement innovations for AI‑native capabilities that touch 40% of the world’s population, setting new standards for scalability, security, explainability, and reusability.

• Drive cross‑functional 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 friction—and driving durable solutions.

• Shape Visa’s next‑generation AI ecosystem, leveraging cloud‑native and modern AI/ML technologies to build robust, privacy‑preserving, and globally scalable services.

• Enable global impact, mentoring teams, developing best practices, and contributing to internal learning programs to elevate Visa’s AI maturity and experimentation culture.

Essential Functions

• Provide deep technical leadership across AI, data platforms, and large‑scale distributed systems—directing 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 end‑to‑end governance.

• Lead planning and implementation for new AI capabilities and intelligent features, ensuring seamless integration into Visa’s global platforms and customer experiences.

• Analyze performance patterns, customer signals, and model behavior to implement systemic improvements and long‑term product enhancements.
The Skills You Bring

• AI‑first mindset—curiosity, 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 highly‑distributed 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 real‑time 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 model‑based product architectures.

• Strong cross‑functional collaboration, working closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, UX, DevOps, and Agile/Scrum teams.
 

This is a hybrid position. On‑site expectations will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

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 at least 8 years of work experience with a PhD

Preferred Qualifications:

• 15 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s 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.

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 $173,100 to $276,800 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.