Senior Director of Engineering - FX - job 1 of 2

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.

Visa is seeking an experienced Sr. Director of FX Engineering to lead our specialized engineering teams across multiple locations in Europe. This individual will act as one of the key technology leaders to provide oversight in building the next generation FX systems that enable our customer-facing operations.

The successful candidate will ensure that our FX systems support an innovative product that supports trading operations across multiple segments and trading flows. Additionally, they will develop systems to convert currencies, operate our industry-leading FX platform, and provide value-added services based on local market needs. The successful candidate will be responsible for hiring top engineering talent, understanding business objectives, and ensuring that FX solutions are designed to meet those objectives. 

Our Sr. Directors lead multiple tribes across multiple domains. Key Responsibilities include:

Leadership and Vision: 

• Lead, support, and mentor Directors and Engineering Managers to be more effective leaders, ensuring the growth and retention of top management and engineering talent. 
• Drive the design and delivery of cloud-native, scalable, resilient, and secure distributed applications.
• Advocate for and implement strategic technological decisions that align with business goals.
• Foster a culture of innovation and flawless execution within the team. 
• Lead change across the entire engineering function, promoting best practices and technical excellence. 
• Be hyper-focused on improving productivity by constantly reducing complexity and waste and leveraging cutting-edge capabilities like ChatGPT and Copilot. 

Technical Strategy and Implementation: 

• Oversee the development and deployment of high-throughput, low-latency applications in a Cloud-Native world. 
• Leverage AI/ML technologies to enhance productivity across the SDLC phases and develop innovative business solutions and products. 

Project and Stakeholder Management: 

• Manage cross-functional priorities and maintain strong relationships with major stakeholders. 
• Lead significant projects with a focus on continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and security implementation. 
• Use a data-driven, KPI-based approach to improve efficiencies across teams. 
• Be realistic with capacity and priorities, proactively managing workload to protect the team and prevent overextension. 

Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: 

• Promote a collaborative culture by delegating tasks effectively and enabling team growth. 
• Share knowledge and best practices to enhance team capabilities and drive a shared strategic approach. 
• Champion cross-team collaboration to maximize output and achieve strategic goals. 
• Reduce the tendency to micromanage, focusing on strategic goals and allowing teams to operate independently. 

Operational Excellence: 

• Maintain and improve technological excellence, ensuring the team meets 'Elite' status under DORA metrics. 
• Ensure efficient processes and ease of release across various projects. 
• Stay abreast of contemporary trends in security risks and technologies, ensuring the team remains ahead of the curve. 
• Establish engineering best practices for application development, testing, deployment, and monitoring. 
• Optimize workload management by taking on fewer projects or requesting more support for large projects. 

Strategy and Communication: 

• Work on business strategy to define a compelling roadmap focused on growth, collaborating with product management teams. 
• Effectively communicate technical strategy and engineering solutions to leadership and business stakeholders. 
• Clearly communicate risks, successes, and learnings in all directions, ensuring alignment with executive-level expectations. 
• Emphasize strategic planning and execution, focusing on medium- and long-term objectives and key results. 

Domain Knowledge: 

• Be highly competent not just on the technical side but also on the product offering and how it is used by customers. 
• Lead change not just across your domain but the whole engineering function, promoting best practices and technical excellence. 

Budget Management: 

• Manage personnel costs with finance busines partners and Technology leadership 
• Develop and maintain relationships with providers alongside our sourcing team, negotiating contracts and ensuring the best value for services rendered. 

Performance Metrics 

• Successful delivery and deployment of secure, scalable applications. 
• Achievement of continuous delivery and DevOps integration benchmarks. 
• Effective management and execution of key projects with measurable outcomes. 
• Demonstrated leadership and collaboration, resulting in team growth and enhanced operational efficiency. 

This is a remote position. A remote position does not require job duties be performed within proximity of a Visa office location. Remote positions may be required to be present at a Visa office with scheduled notice.

Basic Qualifications

• Relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree, Advanced degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or a PhD.

Preferred Qualifications

• Relevant experience in the FX domain, with good knowledge of the technology that powers them, together with product exposure.
• Extensive experience in designing, developing, and deploying scalable, resilient, and secure cloud applications in mission-critical environments.
• Proficiency in backend technologies, including architecture, deployment and operations at all layers of the stack, for both API and Streaming (Kafka) approaches.
• Ability to manage multiple tribes and domains, leading with vision and strategic direction.
• Expertise in continuous delivery and DevOps practices, including infrastructure automation, monitoring, logging, and auditing.
• Proven track record in leading, recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent at scale. Experienced organizing, running, supporting, and growing large technology organizations.
• Professional experience in ideation, execution, delivery and supporting products in Production.
• Must demonstrate longer-term strategic thinking and staying ahead of state-of-the-art curve to keep abreast with what’s possible technically, operationally, and professionally.
• Capable of forming and advocating independent viewpoint. Demonstrate strong skills influencing, negotiating, and communicating.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and leadership skills, with the ability to adapt to various situations and audiences.
• Understand the Security requirements and standards and contemporary trends in Security risks as well as technologies.
• Strong focus on workload management, preventing overextension, and fostering a supportive team environment.
• Domain experience in Cross border money movement and Payment Technologies.
• Hands-on experience in AI, particularly Generative AI, is highly preferred.

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.