Staff Software Engineer (AI Engineer)

About Visa

Visa is a global leader in payment technology, facilitating financial transactions among consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government bodies in over 200 countries and territories. The company is dedicated to enhancing financial inclusivity by providing the best methods for payments and receipts worldwide.

At Visa, employees have the chance to make significant global impact, tackle challenging problems, advance their skills, and see their work improve lives globally.

Role Overview

We are searching for an experienced Staff AI Engineer to develop advanced cybersecurity AI products aimed at enterprise security teams. This role is a hands-on, individual contributor position combining strong AI engineering capabilities with practical software development and a keen interest in cybersecurity. Reporting to the Director of Cybersecurity AI Product, you will collaborate within a newly formed team dedicated to building and operating intelligent solutions to investigate threats, triage alerts, automate workflows, analyze vulnerabilities, and assist in security decision-making.

The ideal candidate is deeply versed in AI, product-focused, proactive, and comfortable navigating ambiguous challenges. Rapid learning, experimentation with new AI technologies, building dependable product features, and translating client issues into AI-driven solutions are key success factors.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement advanced cybersecurity AI products tailored to security operations.
• Develop agentic AI workflows to support cybersecurity engineering, operations, and risk management processes.
• Transform vague product concepts and prototypes into secure, maintainable, production-level AI systems.
• Assume full technical ownership for complex AI product components from ideation through production.
• Decompose ambiguous challenges into clear technical plans, milestones, risks, and deliverables.
• Contribute to and influence product technical roadmaps through customer insights and engineering best practices.
• Identify design shortcomings, technical debts, and scaling risks, making informed trade-offs.
• Research, test, and integrate emerging AI technologies into products, producing documentation, demos, and proof-of-concepts.
• Develop backend services, APIs, integrations, AI orchestration tools, and data pipelines supporting production-grade products.
• Support deployment, continuous monitoring, debugging, and operational sustainability of AI products.
• Engage with CI/CD methodologies, containerization, infrastructure as code, logging, metrics, and automated testing frameworks.
• Architect scalable systems suitable for diverse customers, workloads, and data sources.
• Provide technical mentorship through code reviews, design evaluations, documentation, and example implementations.
• Improve team decision quality with data-driven insights, customer feedback, and trade-off analyses.
• Clearly communicate complex AI, security, and system architecture concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, security teams, solution engineers, and customer-facing teams to ensure solutions address actual workflows.
• Exhibit strong ownership, proactive behavior, customer focus, and adaptability within ambiguous and evolving environments.

Required Qualifications

• Over five years of professional experience in AI and software engineering.
• At least three years building AI/ML, LLM-based, automation, data-driven, or intelligent software solutions.
• Demonstrated track record in delivering production-grade software beyond prototypes or notebooks.
• Experience in product engineering teams developing customer-facing technical products.
• Hands-on familiarity with large language model applications, AI workflow automation, AI assistants, and agentic AI systems.
• Knowledge of AI concepts including prompt engineering, system prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, embeddings, tool calling, function orchestration, context and agent memory management, evaluation datasets, benchmarking, feedback loops.
• Practical experience with agentic AI frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, CrewAI, along with vector databases, knowledge graphs, and model evaluation tools.
• Ability to objectively assess AI output to improve quality, safety, reliability, latency, and cost.
• Experience working with commercial and open-source AI models and APIs.
• Demonstrated use of AI tools for coding, debugging, research, documentation, testing, and productivity enhancements.
• Proficiency in at least two programming languages among Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go, Java, Rust.
• Strong foundation in software architecture, API designs, data modeling, distributed and asynchronous systems, observability, and maintainability.
• Experience developing backend services, APIs, data pipelines, integrations, and cloud-native applications.
• Familiarity with web apps, distributed systems, databases, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, automated tests.
• Commitment to writing clean, maintainable, secure, and production-quality code.
• Participation in design and code reviews, and resolving production issues.
• Basic understanding of cybersecurity principles, secure coding practices, and common vulnerabilities.
• Ability to evaluate security aspects of AI workflows and architectures, with interest in expanding cybersecurity expertise.
• Awareness of AI security risks such as prompt injection, data leakage, hallucinations, adversarial inputs, unsafe tool usages, and permission issues.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), containerization, serverless, managed databases, event-driven systems, queues, object storage, cloud identity.
• Knowledge of observability, deployment automation, environment configurations, operational reliability, cloud security principles including IAM, secrets management.
• Demonstrates strong ownership, accountability, problem-solving skills, customer orientation, and clear communication abilities.
• Comfortable independently and collaborating effectively within a small, agile team under uncertain conditions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degrees (Master's or Ph.D.) in computer science or related fields.
• Experience building AI agents, LLM applications, copilots, automation systems, or retrieval-augmented generation solutions.
• Background with cybersecurity products including security automation, SOC tools, SIEM/SOAR integration, cloud security platforms, identity security, threat intelligence, or incident response workflows.
• Familiarity with AI-specific security threats and mitigation approaches.
• Experience in evaluation methodologies for LLM systems including benchmark datasets, human reviews, offline/online evaluations, regression testing.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, observability platforms, secrets management, cloud-native security.
• Understanding of security frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, OWASP, NIST, CIS Controls, ISO 27001.
• Experience in early-stage product teams, startups, innovation groups, or environments involving ambiguous product incubation.

Additional Information

Visa mandates a minimum of three days per week onsite work; these expectations will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

Visa is an equal opportunity employer committed to non-discrimination on all legally protected statuses and will consider qualified applicants fairly including those with criminal histories per EEOC guidelines and local laws.