Organization Summary

Within Visa’s Technology organization, the Digital & Developer Platform (VDDP) team is a global division of over 1100 team members responsible for developing and managing end-to-end technology solutions that promote the growth of digital commerce and mobilization of payments in emerging and developed markets.  A globally distributed team, VDDP encompasses Product Development, Program Management, Portfolio & Business Management, Architecture, and Test Engineering, Client Integration, Release & Support Engineering functions.  

As the Sr. Director of Release Integration Engineering, you will be responsible for all release certifications, tools development and validations of integrated components of the products developed by the Digital and Developer Platform (DDP) teams. Lead a global team of software leaders and engineers to deliver client-ready software products by building the next generation of release certification testing, tooling services, and system validation technology. Create technology strategy to increase DDP’s release quality and build release validation efficiencies. Provide technical leadership to the release integration solutions organization that tests and releases globally-scaled, fault-tolerant and  highly available payment systems.

Play a leadership role in strategic initiatives providing guidance to the team in test technology, automated validation, integration tools development and quality metrics. You will be responsible for establishing a culture of customer-quality engineering and grow our release quality to high standards. You will partner with development leaders to influence the organization to shift software validations to earlier in the development life cycle. Also partner with the leaders to develop tooling solutions that increase operational efficiency. Build transparency into a distributed test pyramid that spans across several software development teams.

You will be responsible for hiring top talent to grow the global release integration solutions teams and to keep the organization highly engaged and motivated, delivering exceptional results. Your ability to work across functions and teams will allow you to ensure alignment of priorities and goals, driving for results and fostering the right culture and the right environment to achieve excellence and innovation.

You will be responsible to build and manage an engineering team of over 40 technologists focused on delivering key release quality, and efficiency tooling solutions. This is one of the key areas of focus for this role and requires leadership skills focused on dealing with multiple stakeholders to understand their needs clearly and propose and build highly scalable, fault tolerant, secure and reliable release certification and system validation solutions. You will be responsible for establishing a culture of engineering excellence while maintaining a strong focus on software quality and operational excellence.

The individual in this role will:

• Provide leadership and technical guidance within DDP for integrated release and system validations , release certification, automation capabilities and tools development.

• Develop technology strategies and road-maps to meet business objectives with release validation by partnering with Development, Product and Release Engineering stakeholders.

• Own technical design discussions with global business and technical teams to ensure business and technical requirements are understood and properly documented and implemented, including understanding customer scenarios

• Keep executive management informed of progress and any obstacles of quality and release risks to  Visa’s digital and developer platforms and to its customers.

• Apply creative thinking/approach to determine test solutions that further release certification goals while considering reliability, scalability, usability, flexibility, and cost.

• Partner with product development and application architecture teams to drive the evolution of release validations across a broad spectrum of technologies: SDKs, web services/API, mobile applications.

• Establish clear, aligned goals and direction; provide candid feedback and coaching to maximize team competency, support career management and development of direct reports

• Achieve Operational Excellence: test efficiency, test automation, release efficiency. Monitoring release quality and delivery.

• Create/update system quality and system dependency measurements and scorecards and drive functional accountability to continuously improve upon those scores. Define and deliver on core customer quality KPIs.

The ideal candidate will be an experienced technology leader with a proven record of software development, test engineering, and release quality.  S/he will have experience in developing tests, tools, validation technologies that meet high velocity and customer demand. Further, the candidate will have a demonstrated ability to collaborate with business and technology stakeholders to plan, deliver and support will be critical. S/he also needs to have leadership experience to bring engineering excellence, agility and the ability to build a powerful engineering organization. Candidates must have demonstrated success in organizational transformations along dimensions such as deep partnerships and collaboration with development, fostering a culture that encourages customer centricity, innovation and release quality. The successful candidate will balance proactive strategic thinking with flawless execution and delivery creating an environment where accountability is expected and valued.

    Required Key Competencies:

• Technical and Functional Excellence: The candidate will have demonstrated aptitude/capability to manage the release integration, test, tooling and validation technology functions with direct experience leading a global organization. The candidate will possess a deep technical understanding of current and future trends within the payments industry and be capable of developing and executing a strategy that leverages new technology to support system tests to meet product evolution and business performance. S/he is an expert at designing, developing, and deploying scalable software solutions to deliver exceptional quality to clients.   S/he is an expert at test technologies, test automation and quality measurements.

• Thought Leadership: The successful individual brings a mindset that embraces innovation and questions conventional wisdom. S/he will be a recognized domain expert in key areas such as test technology, system validation and integration-tool development. In addition, s/he is an expert with regard to emerging technology trends, innovations, and developments related to mobile applications and digital technologies.  S/he understands  quality success measures.

• Team Leadership: The candidate will recruit, lead, mentor, and develop a world-class test technology team, providing opportunities for growth to ensure continuity of the department’s leadership. The ideal candidate will develop a culture comfortable with challenging current market paradigms to achieve and exceed goals. The candidate will help build best-in-class capabilities at Visa

• Individual & Organizational Leadership: The candidate will think with a global mindset and is able to develop solutions to meet the varying needs of everyone, everywhere. The candidate will be mission driven and passionate about having a lasting impact by driving change in the payments industry. The candidate will enjoy working at a fast pace, be self-directed, and able to manage multiple concurrent competing challenges, issues and priorities. The candidate will be motivated to explore new technologies and learn new things, while also recognizing that many good ideas and implementations may already exist. The candidate will be a customer champion.

  Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or closely related discipline required.  Graduate degree in Computer Science or closely related discipline preferred

• 10+ years’ experience of software development, software engineering leadership, test engineering and support; at least 5 of which are in senior management roles. Digital, mobile, and payments product development experience strongly preferred

• Experience working with API’s, client interfaces, or prior software/ test engineering / quality experience.

• Must have a solid understanding of web technologies (TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS), REST, SOAP,XML, JSON and other relevant API standards like OAuth, SAML

• Experience in mobile engineering and eCommerce systems

• Strong leadership and people management skills, with demonstrated ability to lead global, cross-functional teams. Strong analytical and problem solving skills.

Visa will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.