Lead Data Scientist

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

Company Description

As the world's leader in digital payments technology, Visa's mission is to connect the world through the most creative, reliable and secure payment network - enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive. Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second. The company's dedication to innovation drives the rapid growth of connected commerce on any device, and fuels the dream of a cashless future for everyone, everywhere. As the world moves from analog to digital, Visa is applying our brand, products, people, network and scale to reshape the future of commerce.

At Visa, your individuality fits right in. Working here gives you an opportunity to impact the world, invest in your career growth, and be part of an inclusive and diverse workplace. We are a global team of disruptors, trailblazers, innovators and risk-takers who are helping drive economic growth in even the most remote parts of the world, creatively moving the industry forward, and doing meaningful work that brings financial literacy and digital commerce to millions of unbanked and underserved consumers.

You're an Individual. We're the team for you. Together, let's transform the way the world pays.

 

Job Description

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 team 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 valuable asset in Visa. The Data Platform Department is dedicated to develop advanced technology (e.g. Cloud, Machine Learning and Big Data), systems and services to make data secure, high quality, rich, fast, and easy to use, therefore enabling Visa the ability to leverage its data asset in an effective and timely manner to maximize technology/business development and differentiate Visa from others in the payment industry. The department maintains tens of petabytes of data supporting over 100 services for various internal lines of business and external clients.

Position Summary:

To ensure that Visa’s payment technology is truly available to everyone, everywhere requires the success of our key bank or merchant partners and internal business units. The data platform team supports these partners by using our extraordinarily rich data set that spans more than 3 billion cards globally and captures more than 100 billion transactions in a single year. Our focus lies on building creative solutions that have an immediate impact on the business of our highly analytical partners. We work in complementary teams comprising members from Data Science and various groups at Visa. To support our rapidly growing group we are looking for Data Scientists who are equally passionate about the opportunity to use Visa’s rich data to tackle meaningful business problems.

This position reports to the Sr. Director of Architecture for Data as a Service team in Data Platform and will be based in Bellevue, WA.

Responsibilities

  • Be an out-of-the-box thinker who is passionate about brainstorming innovative ways to use our unique data to answer business problems
  • Communicate with internal and external clients to understand the challenges they face and convince them with data
  • Extract and understand data to form an opinion on how to best help our clients and derive relevant insights
  • Develop visualizations to make your complex analyses accessible to a broad audience
  • Partner with a variety of Visa teams to provide comprehensive solutions
  • Find opportunities to craft products out of analyses that are suitable for multiple clients
  • Contribute to the Data Platform strategies and roadmap development to meet business objectives with existing or emerging technologies. Ability to translate business concepts to technical terms. Understands and communicates company goals and objectives.
  • Apply creative thinking/approach to determine technical solutions that further business goals and align with corporate technology strategies, keeping in mind performance, reliability, scalability, usability, security, flexibility, and cost.
  • Engage with Data Platform customers/partners to understand their needs and provide suggestions/guidance on what data platform techniques are appropriate to solve their problems with pros/cons articulated clearly.
  • Drive internal proof of concept initiatives. When needed, quickly design and implement a prototype of a system or component with a proper architecture, and then hand over to (may lead) a small group of devs to finish.
  • Provide mentorship and help team growth especially on technical side.

Qualifications

Can you take on the responsibilities described above? Then please apply! Independent of years of experience or educational background, successful candidates frequently have a mix of the following qualifications:

  • Experienced technology leader with a minimum of 10+ years of software development experience including 2+ years of data science experience.
  • Bachelor’s degree in an analytical field such as statistics, operations research, economics, computer science or many others (graduate degree is a plus)
  • Experience with extracting and aggregating data from large data sets using SQL, Hive or other tools
  • Competence in Excel, PowerPoint and Tableau
  • Experience in understanding and analyzing data using statistical software (e.g., Python, SAS, R, Stata or others)
  • Previous exposure to financial services, credit cards or merchant analytics is a plus, but not required
  • Technical background in data with deep understanding of issues in multiple areas such as data acquisition and processing, data management, distributed processing, and high availability is required. Experience in statistics, data mining, machine learning and operational excellence of production systems is a plus.
  • Strong at technical goal setting for a project with actionable success metrics. Good knowledge and experience on measuring a service from user experience angle.
  • Strong on driving for results and self-motivated, strong learning mindset, with good understanding of related advanced/new technology. Keep up with the technology development in the related areas in the industry, which could be leveraged to enhance current architectures and build durable new ones.
  • Outstanding verbal, written, presentation, facilitation, and interaction skills, including ability to effectively communicate architectural issues and concepts to multiple organization levels and executive management.

Additional Information

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

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