Staff Applied Scientist II

Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

At Visa, you'll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world. Join Visa and do work that matters — to you, to your community, and to the world.

Progress starts with you.

The Visa Acceptance Platform is the foundation for creating innovative payment solutions that drive exceptional customer experience. It lets you easily leverage a broad range of pre-integrated modular services and a growing ecosystem of technology and payments partners. Because it's Visa, the platform is secure, robust, and resilient. And because it's open, it will continue evolving to support you into the future.

At Visa, we believe AI technologies have the potential to radically transform commerce. We launched Visa Intelligent Commerce to enable this next era of commerce. This program provides the infrastructure and tools developers need to build trusted, agentic experiences.

Make an impact with a purpose-driven industry leader. Join us today and be part of AI transformation journey at Visa.

We are looking for a versatile, curious, and energetic Senior Applied Scientist to join our team of passionate and dedicated data scientists and engineers. We are the backbone for innovative data science and artificial intelligence developments at Visa acceptance, and we thrive on solving complex challenges on a global scale! As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will be an integral part of a multi-functional development team inventing, designing, building, and testing products that reach a truly global customer base.

• You will face big challenges and question the status quo, changing the way data products are developed at Visa! Come join us and see your efforts shape the digital future of payments.
• The focus is on defining, executing, and delivering product and technical features at scale quickly and promoting a diverse culture of cross-functional collaboration and engineering excellence. Be an idea leader and bring industry best practices to benefit the team and the wider organization. The ability to balance demanding business capabilities with building for operational excellence while meeting regulatory, security and privacy requirements.
• Ability to quickly grasp and evaluate new ideas and technologies from internal and external sources. Lead/Influence multiple teams, matching them with appropriate technology and business problems while building a culture of both innovation and drive for excellence.
• Transform our digital offerings by leveraging AI to enhance our current product line and develop exciting new products targeting our banking, fintech and integration partners, which will enable the next wave of innovation in payments. We need a strong technology leader, who is an expert in data science, agile delivery, building purpose driven teams, and has a background in complex integration projects. Prior experience in payments, or a background in building high volume transaction and data processing systems is preferred.

Essential Functions:

• Provides technical expertise and mentors others to implement extensible, maintainable, and reusable data models and strategies and adheres to all security and privacy requirements for the application of artificial intelligence and data science.
• Develops strategies for and leads team's efforts to drive efficiencies across data extraction and ensure data quality and completeness using data wrangling, complex data modeling, and artificial intelligence.
• Ensures adherence to data management principles, governance, process, and tools to maintain data quality across products.
• Advises on technical specifications during discussions with collaborators (e.g., Product owners, business partners, Cybersecurity) to identify and clarify sophisticated technical or business requirements and identify business needs and upstream and/or downstream system/application dependencies.
• Defines technical standards for the design and documents the architecture for a complex product, using existing architecture design patterns.
• Oversees and establishes unit testing requirements of unit testing to confirm functional capability of code, acts as subject matter expert in testing for coding standards and security scans, strategically leads user acceptance testing in collaboration with customer across multiple domains.
• Identifies complex trends across relevant data sources and uses insights to plan platform-wide future solution updates. Identifies opportunities and defines roadmap for software upgrades and server patches for security remediation where applicable.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

Basic Qualifications:

• 8+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 5 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 2 years of work experience with a PhD, OR 11+ years of relevant work experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 9 or more years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor Degree or 7 or more relevant years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 3 or more years of experience with a PhD
• Four (4) years of experience solving data problems using data technologies (e.g., Hadoop, Hive, Kafka, Redis, NoSQL, RDBMS)
• Two (2) years of experience designing, building/fine tuning ML/AI models around data insights, anomaly detection e.t.c
• Two (2) years of experience in designing, building, evaluating metrics for model performance and business outcome
• Three (3) years of experience building and pushing code into production.
• Expert in at least one of the following: Python, R, Java
• Experience with Big Data and Analytics in general leveraging technologies like Hadoop, Spark, Flink and MapReduce

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 this position is 162,500.00 to 260,400.00 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.