Senior Director, Cloud Platform and Reliability Engineering

About the Role

Join Visa, a global leader in payment technologies that connects consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and governments across over 200 countries. At Visa, you can make a meaningful global impact by advancing payment solutions.

This senior leadership position focuses on defining and delivering a secure, scalable, and reliable cloud platform environment that empowers engineering teams to accelerate product delivery efficiently and safely.

Responsibilities

• Develop and execute the overall cloud platform strategy encompassing infrastructure, scalability, reliability, and cost management.
• Lead initiatives to optimize operational costs across infrastructure and shared services ensuring cost-effectiveness without reducing system reliability, security, or deployment speed.
• Manage and evolve large-scale cloud environments supporting 24/7 production operations in alignment with defined SLOs/SLAs involving availability, latency, error rates, and recovery targets (RTO/RPO).
• Oversee complex operational concerns such as capacity planning, incident management for critical outages, change control, release safety, and dependencies on third-party vendors.
• Build and mentor high-performance teams in platform engineering, cloud operations, and site reliability engineering.
• Promote an automation-first culture by adopting Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, and standardized self-service platforms to minimize manual efforts.
• Ensure service reliability and drive operational excellence through incident management, root cause analysis, and long-term problem remediation.
• Collaborate closely with engineering, product, and security leadership to align platform capabilities with business priorities and secure design practices.
• Implement robust monitoring, logging, alerting, and metrics systems to maintain and improve platform health and support data-driven decisions.
• Develop and validate resilience and disaster recovery plans including testing failure scenarios and readiness for recovery.
• Deliver executive-level reports on platform status, risks, and progress against strategic roadmap.
• Manage relationships with cloud service providers and external vendors as necessary.
• Provide reliable 24x7 operational coverage while continuously enhancing efficiency to reduce operational workload via engineering improvements.

Additional Information

This full-time position is based onsite in Auckland, New Zealand with a hybrid work arrangement requiring at least three days per week in the office, as determined by the hiring manager.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 15 years’ experience in engineering leadership roles focused on infrastructure, cloud platform, or site reliability engineering.
• Proven track record leading cloud platforms or cloud services at scale, preferably using AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Extensive experience managing production systems ensuring high availability and reliability.
• Strong leadership capabilities managing cross-functional teams within a matrixed organizational structure.
• Excellent communication skills, able to articulate complex technical concepts to senior leadership and stakeholders.
• Solid technical expertise in Infrastructure as Code and configuration management tools.
• Deep understanding of CI/CD practices and release engineering methodology.
• Proficiency with monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks.
• Experience with Linux environments and scripting languages such as Python.

Equal Opportunity Employment

Visa is an equal opportunity employer committed to non-discriminatory hiring practices. Qualified candidates will be considered regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, veteran status, or criminal history as governed by applicable laws.