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Visa Inc.

Lead Software Engineer

Visa Inc.

Bellevue, WA · Principal

$173,100 – $276,800

Listed on Visa Inc.’s own careers site. You apply with them directly — we never stand between you and the employer.

What this role is

This is a principal-level individual contributor role leading the technical vision and architecture for Visa's payment transaction processing platform. The position combines significant hands-on coding (40-50%) with cross-organizational technical leadership, mentoring, and pioneering adoption of AI practices across distributed systems handling billions of transactions.

Our summary, not Visa Inc.’s wording. The full posting is on their site.

What they ask for

Required

  • 10+ years relevant experience with Bachelor's degree, or 7+ years with Master's/MBA/JD/MD, or 4+ years with PhD, or 13+ years total experience
  • Deep expertise designing and scaling mission-critical distributed systems
  • Expert proficiency in modern programming languages and system design
  • Mastery of cloud platforms and Kubernetes
  • Deep experience with event-driven systems and high-throughput data processing
  • Experience setting technical direction and influencing strategy across teams
  • Track record mentoring senior engineers
  • Hands-on software development and architecture for transaction processing platforms

Nice to have

  • 12+ years experience with Bachelor's degree, or 8-10 years with advanced degree, or 6+ years with PhD
  • 15+ years with progressive technical leadership responsibilities
  • Demonstrated organization-wide technical impact
  • Recognized expertise in distributed systems (publications, speaking, patents)
  • Experience with AI/ML at scale in production
  • Track record building platforms serving billions of transactions
  • Experience working with executive leadership on technical strategy
  • History developing engineers who grew into senior technical roles
  • Deep understanding of payment processing and transaction lifecycle
  • Experience with payment network protocols (Visa, Mastercard, Amex)
  • Experience with event correlation and transaction matching
  • Knowledge of retry mechanisms, dead-letter queues, and event replay
  • Understanding of exactly-once processing and idempotency patterns
  • Experience in payments, financial services, or high-scale transaction processing

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