Senior Staff Engineer - Featurespace

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.

At Visa, we are passionate about making a difference. We lead the way in disrupting fraud from multiple vectors. In this role you will be joining an exciting, innovative business new to the Visa family.

At Featurespace, we strive to be the world's best software company at protecting our clients and their customers from fraud attacks. We do that with personality, heart and professionalism, cultivating an innovative, fun and positive team atmosphere where everybody can contribute to solving our clients' problems in new, innovative ways. We are always seeking to be the best at what we do and make our customers smile.

The Opportunity

As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will help us achieve our goals and deliver success on behalf of our customer by designing and developing complex, scalable services and infrastructure for our SaaS platform. You will lead technical initiatives that span multiple teams and domains, collaborating with product, engineering, and infrastructure stakeholders to define and deliver technical strategy.

You will provide deep technical guidance and mentorship to engineering teams. Shaping system architecture and contributing to key design decisions. You will drive standards for code quality, testing, operational readiness, and deployment, as well as leading and participating in incident response for critical production systems (including on-call as necessary).

Responsibilities

We hire people with a willingness to adapt to a variable role, so along with the key responsibilities below, we ask for ownership of any other duties as required.

• Build and maintain strong working relationships across product, infrastructure, and operations.
• Act as a technical architect and thought leader across teams, influencing design decisions and technology direction at the department level.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of technically ambitious, high-impact projects.
• Proactively identify system-wide challenges and propose scalable, robust solutions.
• Be accountable for the long-term technical health and operational excellence of key parts of the platform.
• Contribute to and evolve engineering-wide best practices, tooling, and operational processes.
• Provide technical sponsorship and mentorship for engineers at all levels, including Senior and Staff Engineers.
• Partner with engineering leadership to shape technology vision, hiring strategy, and organizational design.
• Act as a primary escalation point for cross-cutting initiatives, architecture concerns, and stakeholder alignment.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office are 3 days per week.

Basic Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor's Degree or at least 5 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 2 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 11+ years of relevant work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• 9 or more years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor Degree or 7 or more relevant years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 3 or more years of experience with a PhD

Required experience:

• Extensive experience in software engineering, including experience in staff+ level roles or equivalent scope.
• Proven track record of technical leadership across teams and large-scale systems.
• Expertise in distributed systems design, scalable architecture, and cloud infrastructure.
• Proficient in object-oriented programming (preferably Java), and experienced in system-level thinking.
• Experience driving design reviews, architectural guidance, and technical decision-making.
• Strong background in test automation, continuous integration, and system monitoring.
• Comfortable operating in a modern DevOps environment, with production ownership responsibilities.

Work Hours: Varies upon the needs of the department.

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 a new hire into this position is 135,200.00 to 196,300.00 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.