Sr. Director, Platform as a Service Dev Team Head

  • Full-time
  • Job Family Group: Technology and Operations

Company Description

About Visa:

Common Purpose, Uncommon Opportunity.  Everyone at Visa works with one goal in mind – making sure that Visa is the best way to pay and be paid, for everyone everywhere. This is our global vision and the common purpose that unites the entire Visa team.  As a global payments technology company, tech is at the heart of what we do: Our VisaNet network processes over 13,000 transactions per second for people and businesses around the world, enabling them to use digital currency instead of cash and checks. We are also global advocates for financial inclusion, working with partners around the world to help those who lack access
to financial services join the global economy. Visa’s sponsorships, including he Olympics and FIFA™ World Cup, celebrate teamwork, diversity, and excellence throughout the world. If you have a passion to make a difference in the lives of people around the world, Visa offers an uncommon opportunity to build a strong, thriving career. Visa is fueled by our team of talented employees who continuously raise the bar  on delivering the convenience and security of digital currency to people all over the world. Join our team and find out how Visa is everywhere you want to be.

You may have noticed that payment has become a very active/hot area in the last several years. Given the strong demands and innovation, this will be a very exciting area in the next 5 to 10 years. VISA is clearly a very strong leader in the payment industry, and is in a fast pace of technology transformation. For a payment system to work well, advance technologies such as data platform, big data, data mining, machine learning, cloud, etc. are critical. In VISA, we have all of these. The Data Platform Department is in the center for many of these technologies and development.

The Data Platform (DP) department is a key component of Visa's Technology organization that provides an enriched and valuable ecosystem of data platform and data services that drive innovation for our partners and clients, within Visa and globally. Data is the most value asset in Visa. The Data Platform group is dedicated to develop advanced technology (e.g. Cloud, Machine Learning and Big Data), systems and services to make data secure, rich, high quality, and fast therefore enabling Visa the ability to leverage its data assets in an effective and timely manner to maximize technology/business development and differentiate Visa from others in the payment industry. The group maintains tens of petabytes of data supporting over 100 services for various internal lines of business and external clients.

The Platform as a Service (PaaS) Dev team inside the Data Platform department is responsible on developing platforms and services that enable efficient and effective data processing and service at large scale, timely,
and easy to use. This includes faster growing data analysis needs as well as the rapid development and hosting of data-driven applications at VISA.

Job Description

We are looking for an outstanding leader to lead the PaaS Dev team. This position will report to the Senior Vice President of the Data Platform department, and will be based in Visa’s Palo Alto office. PaaS Dev
team is responsible for developing, setting up, tuning, and maintaining large scale data platforms and offering them to Visa internal groups and external customers as services. The platforms include Visa specific data platforms and open source platforms. The platforms need to be secure, reliable, efficient, and easy to use. To make this a reality, automation is critical. This position offers you the opportunity to be at the center of innovation in the payments industry and unleash the power of data through building a mission-critical big
data platform and powerful information services.

This position is responsible for developing and executing a shared vision for a mission-critical PaaS layer of the Visa Data Platform that enables Visa to be a world-leading data-driven company. A successful candidate needs to be highly technical, with strong architect experience, and have demonstrated ability to lead, recruit, grow and retain high-caliber data talent at scale. Prior experience must include leadership for mission-critical large scale data systems for analytic and operational use. Examples include real-time data collection systems, large scale data pipelines, warehousing, cloud technology like Hadoop and Spark, business intelligence, predictive analytics, and near real-time data systems.

A successful candidate will have demonstrated excellence in delivery for platforms internal to organization, for delivery to internal and external customers and for programs that cut across multiple organizations.

We desire a candidate who has grown into an organizational leader after strong personal achievements as a hands-on architecture designer and system builder in the related areas. Demonstrated success in building
partnerships with other technology functions such as operations, security, development, and data sciences is required.

The ideal candidate will have a very strong technical background in cloud technologies, big data, web technologies, large scale distributed platforms, machine Learning, etc., and is a thought leader, is very
familiar with the up to date development of the industry in these areas, have exceptional organizational skills, written and verbal communication skills, management and software solution delivery.

Responsibilities: 

  • Build, grow, and lead the PaaS team globally including US and India to develop and maintain end to end technical solutions while fostering innovation, leveraging new technologies, and strong customer
    centered service mindset. Shape a highly performant PaaS Dev team with top talents.
  • Develop Vision, strategies and roadmaps to meet business objectives with existing or emerging technologies in your area by partnering with other stakeholders in DP and Visa
  • Foster innovation and leverage new technologies
  • Keep track of the industry development status of PaaS and DaaS. Evaluate new product opportunities and bring forward proposals to expand our product line
  • Define the strategy of PaaS by partnering with other leaders in the DP org
  • Champion culture changes needed to recognize and manage data as a first-order business asset
  • Responsible for the overall development life cycle of the products and services in the PaaS area
  • Apply creative thinking/approach to determine technical solutions that further business goals and align with corporate technology strategies, keeping in mind security, performance, reliability, scalability, usability, flexibility, and cost
  • Provide resource plans, budget tracking and forecasting.  Manage the team to achieve target scope, schedule and cost objectives
  • Instill best practices for software development and service execution. Drive for engineering excellence including automation, quality, efficiency, and productivity. Automation and reliability are the key for providing large scale services effectively.
  • Provide technical guidance to the team including architecture, design, and code reviews
  • Project task prioritization, planning of projects and features, stakeholder management and tracking of external commitments
  • Define success metrics and SLAs, as well as tracking them toward agreed target
  • Manage multiple vectors of change such as technology migration, location rationalization, in-sourcing and process changes while ensuring business delivery
  • Operational Excellence: monitoring & operation of production services including understanding user experience and ensuring happy customers through partnering with your product support team
  • Build partnerships with internal stakeholders across Visa


Qualifications

  • BA/BS degree is required. Concentration in Computer Science, or a related technical discipline.
  • Experience demonstrating strong leadership, self-motivation, accountability, and team player.
  • 12+ years of industry experience in the big data and/or large scale data platform areas, including 5+ experience managing and leading development teams in the Big Data and Web Technologies
    areas
  • 5+ years of hands on architecture design and software development experience on complex large scale
    systems/platforms
  • Proven experience managing the software development of highly available enterprise level applications and platforms as services.
  • Deep expertise in the areas of big data and cloud technology such as Hadoop, Spark, HBase, and Kafka is required. Experience in the areas of machine learning, data mining, databases, data
    analysis, and BI are a big plus.
  • Technical background in data with deep understanding of issues in multiple areas such as data management, data analysis, query processing, distributed processing, high availability,
    statistical, data mining, machine learning, large scale platform, and data API
  • Strong at technical goal setting for a project with actionable success metrics. Good knowledge and experience on measuring a service from a user experience angle
  • Passion for big data, including strong interest in data science, statistics, and analytics
  • Outstanding communications ability to a diverse customer audience, including C-level executives, product, and technical stakeholders
  • Fast learner on both technical side and business side
  • Broad knowledge of the state of art industry development status in the related areas
  • Strong customer centric mindset.
  • More than comfortable in a fluid matrixed organization
  • Proactive sense of urgency and 'can do' attitude
  • Financial services and card payments experience is a plus
  • Experience managing and working with geo-distributed team is a plus


Additional Information

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

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