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 relentless focus on innovation is a catalyst for the rapid growth of digital commerce on any device 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.

Department summary

Part of the global Product organisation, Visa’s Innovation & Design team is a clients and partners facing organization that explores and addresses emerging growth areas
“at the edge of the Network” and plugs existing and new Visa capabilities into future growth use cases. Innovation & Design, with its full-stack functional skills, is uniquely positioned to act as the creative & development hub to support key product initiatives and commercialisation efforts and help transform Visa Europe into a human centered product organization. The Innovation & Design team runs Innovation hubs in various regional offices. This role focuses on Visa’s European region.

What's it all about?

Our dynamic and start-up-like team of creative strategists, designers, architects, technologist and developers is looking for an experienced, energetic and talented Product Innovation Architect, Senior Manager, with a passion for defining ‘how a solution’ works from the vision to the technical details to drive a new initiative into a technically feasible opportunity. Work in close collaboration with our Global and EU Product teams to understand Visa’s existing solution stack, in order to be best position to shape and influence the Product roadmap.

What we expect you to do, day to day.

• Work in a cross-functional team of product managers, propositions leads, designers, developers and project managers that are developing solutions to client / market problems.
• Lead development of the vision for the technical dimension of the solution (the “solution architecture”) by using inputs from the cross-functional team to:
  • Take a user journey as a starting point and identify the “below the line” Visa and client capabilities / resources required to support that journey.
  • Create sequence / collaboration / process models & diagrams that describe how those resources and capabilities work together, paying particular attention to the data items passing between tasks / activities and the roles / responsibilities of Visa and clients in making the technical dimension of the solution work.
  • Translate these models and diagrams into a set of architecture user stories that can be added to the product backlog.
  • Refine the stories further by leading ideation / backlog grooming sessions with the Visa / partner development teams that will implement them.  
• Ensure that the solution architecture complies with all data privacy, regulatory and operational requirements and demonstrate that the solution is feasible from these perspectives.
• Develop a strong partnership with the European and Global design teams. Use that relationship to make sure that the solution architecture stretches the technical “art of the possible” in the direction of delivering a best in class user experience i.e. the solution architecture should not act as an inhibitor to UX but as an enabler.
• Develop strong partnerships with the Product teams in Europe and in Global. Understand their roadmaps and align the solution architecture to the roadmap to ensure that it can be delivered. Become a trusted advisor to these teams by developing new use cases for their products that solve existing pain points and generate revenue gains. Use this advisory position to work with the teams to shape their roadmaps to better prepare their products to meet emerging regional needs in Europe.
• As a senior member of team, coach / mentor other architects.
• Build relationships with other architect peers in Visa, whether they report into Product or Technology. 
• Identifying gaps in product capabilities / features and working with partners / internal Visa teams to address. This involves:
  • Getting the sponsorship from these teams to develop the missing capabilities / features by aligning product roadmaps.
  • Expressing requirements for the missing capabilities / features as a set of user stories
  • Supporting the teams in ideation / backlog grooming sessions to refine the user stories to a point where they can be developed.
• Present the solution architecture to any stakeholder, in particular supporting the NBIA and contractual conversations by responding to questions on the technical dimension of the solution.
• Work with the cross-functional team to take solutions from definition, validation into pilot and then to commercialization.
• Lead the technical aspect of client conversations and where appropriate take feedback from the client and update models, diagrams and user stories, to improve the solution architecture.
• Filing an invention disclosure when there appears to be “novelty” in the technical solution being proposed.
• Keeping up to date with product developments in Visa and industry working groups e.g. Open Banking, FIDO, to ensure that the solution architecture is appropriately aligned

• A deep knowledge of the card payment industry and Visa products in particular.
• Mid- to senior level experience of solution architecture in the card payment industry.
• Extensive experience of being a member of teams that operate using agile working methodologies and principles; and in particular experience of creating user stories according to the INVEST methodology.
• Excellent stakeholder management and negotiation skills with clients/vendors/internal teams and experience of procurement processes and contract management.
• Extensive experience of building partnerships across functions.
• Experience of mentoring / coaching architects. 
• Strong technical skills, including the ability to code to APIs and prove out the early stage technical feasibility of an architecture. Other technical skills to include, MS Office (particularly MS Visio), PowerPoint, JIRA/Wiki, EA Sparx)
• Proactive, enthusiastic and passionate about emerging technologies and trends, with extensive experience in working with developers and technical teams.
• An understanding and/or willingness to learn about and apply Human Centered Design (Design Thinking, sprints, etc.) principles to your work.
• A self-starter who is able to work well in a fast-paced, fun and creative team environment but is able to work independently as well.
• A passion for solving the problems of the future through innovation, technology & design to build better businesses for the future.
• Program /project management skills would be preferred but not mandatory.