Sr. Systems Engineer

Visa is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating more than 215 billion payments transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across 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.

When you join Visa, you join a culture of purpose and belonging – where your growth is priority, your identity is embraced, and the work you do matters. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere. Your work will have a direct impact on billions of people around the world – helping unlock financial access to enable the future of money movement.

Join Visa: A Network Working for Everyone.

Visa’s Technology Organization is a community of problem solvers and innovators reshaping the future of commerce.   We operate the world’s most sophisticated processing networks capable of handling more than 65k secure transactions a second across 80M merchants, 15k Financial Institutions, and billions of everyday people. While working with us you’ll get to work on complex distributed systems and solve massive scale problems centered on new payment flows, business and data solutions, cyber security, and B2C platforms.   

IaaS Systems and Storage & Engineering (ISSE) team is part of the Operations & Infrastructure technology organization at Visa. Our vision, mission and purpose are summarized as following:

Vision - Deliver best-in-class Infrastructure on demand everywhere.  

Mission - Engineer and build reliable and secure infrastructure for all type of workloads in Private/ Hybrid Cloud, utilizing open and innovative technologies at the right unit cost.

Purpose - increase innovation velocity of developers and reduce infrastructure maintenance overhead

The Opportunity:

You will be part of a team of cloud infrastructure engineers & architects who adopt, integrate & engineer industry leading technologies and management solutions for the on-prem container platform and public clouds, focusing on Kubernetes, microservices architecture, and cloud technologies. You will assume the total ownership of the solutions we provide for our customers to ensure availability, performance, security, and reliability of the applications running on the infrastructure we engineer, implement and support.  You will also define, advocate, and deliver standard foundational services for Visa public cloud implementation, closely collaborate with stakeholders to design & implement solutions with strong security posture, deliver functionalities with optimized cost, and improve developer productivity. As a team, we will do these all at global scale. Continuous, iterative improvements in our process, technology, tools, and automation will be essential to meet those goals.

Essential Functions

The ideal candidate is technology savvy with good knowledge of Linux operating systems, container, Kubernetes and Microservices architecture. Have extensive experience driving design and implementation of infrastructure solutions on-prem, or on one of the major public clouds, such as AWS, GCP & Azure. Proficient in programming/scripting in Golang, Python, Ansible or Terraform. Familiar with CI/CD for development and deployment, with experience working on opensource projects, contributing, and committing the code. You will play a leading role to deliver secure, highly available and scalable infrastructure solution and associated automation. 

• Design and implement agile, innovative infrastructure solutions that leverage the latest technology advancements for cost reduction, standardization, and commoditization.

• Design, implement, and manage private cloud implementations (Docker/CRI-O Kubernetes) across global data centers, ensuring reliability, scalability, and security

• Collaborate with the team to enhance the containerization ecosystem, establish standards, and integrate infrastructure management domains such as logging, monitoring, configuration management, security compliance, and orchestration. Identify and implement standardized toolsets to reduce complexity and support operational goals for increased automation across the enterprise

• Champion the adoption of open-source infrastructure management solutions that are fit for purpose and align with the goal of keeping technology relevant.

• Define and document best practices and strategies regarding application deployment and infrastructure maintenance. Identify and implement optimal cloud-based solutions and serve as the focal point for hybrid cloud infrastructure-related inquiries and engagements.

• Oversee the JIRA board and lead the infrastructure engineering agile team meetings.

• Define and advocate for standard foundational services for public/hybrid cloud implementations. Develop, implement, and automate policies for the use of cloud services, manage requests for new technologies, drive standardization, establish a secure cloud environment, and ensure appropriate service availability.

• Collaborate with the team to establish hybrid cloud engineering practices, including peer code reviews, pull requests, release cadences, and standardized deployment pipeline and toolsets.

• Coordinate closely with the M&A team to ensure the adoption of our standards by each acquired entity, while offering flexibility for customization and enablement.

• Provide guidance, thought leadership, and mentorship to development teams to build cloud competencies. Promote the cloud and container management platform standards and capabilities, gain insights into the workflows of Product Development, Engineering, and Operations teams, ensure platform relevance, drive adoption, and facilitate the transformation of applications from monolithic to microservices.

• Collaborate effectively with geographically distributed teams on technical challenges and process improvements.

This is a hybrid position. Hybrid employees can alternate time between both remote and office. Employees in hybrid roles are expected to work from the office 2-3 set days a week (determined by leadership/site), with a general guidepost of being in the office 50% or more of the time based on business needs.

Basic Qualifications
• 2+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelors degree, OR 5+ years of relevant work experience

Preferred Qualifications
• 3 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or more than 2 years of work experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD)
• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Demonstrated experience in managing production container ecosystems, including Docker, Kubernetes, Service Mesh (preferably Istio or Linkerd), CNI (specifically Calico or Cilium), CSI drivers. Experience with GitOps for infrastructure management and Kubernetes Cluster APIs for cluster management is a plus.
• Proficiency in implementing and managing Istio ingress and egress gateways for controlling traffic and security features such as Authentication, Authorization, and service-to-service communication encryption with mTLS. Hands-on experience with Istio's policy enforcement and telemetry features. Familiarity with Istio's resiliency features such as timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and fault injection.
• Proven track record in defining and executing technology strategies, and driving their adoption across a large enterprise.
• Experience in architecting, designing, developing, and implementing cloud solutions on at least one of the major public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Extensive experience in automating system tasks and managing infrastructure using a scripting language (preferably Golang or Python). Familiarity with configuration management tools (such as Ansible), service registry and discovery tools (like Consul, Vault, or etcd), infrastructure orchestration tools (such as Ansible or Terraform), and automated imaging tools (like Packer) is required.
• Experience in designing, building, and/or managing production systems in the cloud (preferably AWS), with a focus on infrastructure as code, continuous integration, automated deployment, testing, autoscaling, and self-healing.
• Proficiency in using and optimizing monitoring and observability systems (like Prometheus, Grafana), log aggregation systems (such as ELK, Splunk, Fluent Bit), and familiarity with emerging OpenTelemetry standards.
• Experience in conducting full-stack load testing to identify and address hardware, network, system, or application bottlenecks.
• Deep understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle, including Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline architecture (Jenkins, GitLab, Drone). Experience deploying into Kubernetes environments using tools like ArgoCD or Flux is a plus.
• Familiarity with network and application protocols (like TCP, HTTP) and databases, including at least one RDBMS and one columnar or NoSQL store.
• Strong knowledge of security tools and best practices, including CIS Benchmarking, OS hardening, vulnerability scanning, and system auditing.
• Solid understanding of networking concepts such as DNS, TCP/IP, network policies, and load balancing.
• Strong analytical skills, with the ability to troubleshoot and solve complex engineering problems independently. Able to make decisions within established guidelines.
• Self-starter with excellent time management skills, able to manage multiple tasks simultaneously with minimal supervision.
• Proven ability to lead with passion and execute vision with minimal guidance.
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written, with the ability to effectively interact with peers, management, and external contacts.
• High degree of initiative and a sense of urgency, comfortable with ambiguity as needs change regularly

Opensource Specific

• Extensive experience contributing to or interacting with open-source communities, with a deep understanding of how such projects operate, including contributing to them, and effective communication within these communities.
• Established reputation and influence within the open-source community, especially in the Kubernetes project. Comprehensive understanding of the latest industry/eco-system trends, with up-to-date knowledge of recent developments, new features, updates, and best practices.
• Ability to act as a spokesperson on behalf of the organization, articulating the organization's requirements for enhancements of existing Kubernetes features or requests for new features. Experience in prioritizing and advocating for these changes or features in the open-source community, leading the open-source development effort for specific features, and driving collaboration across the open-source community with members from different organizations.
• Proven ability to collaborate effectively both internally and across the open-source community. Internally, the ability to champion the open-source initiative, build consensus and alliances with architecture, operations, and other engineering teams, and establish reference deployment architecture, governance, and policies for using Kubernetes, including deployment, admission control, security, compliance, resource usage, etc. Externally, effective collaboration with the open-source community on both technical (like contributing code or documentation) and social (like participating in discussions or debates) levels. 

Work Hours: Varies upon the needs of the department.

Travel Requirements: This position requires travel 5-10% of the time.

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 102,300.00 to 130,500.00 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.