Staff SW Engineer (10-12 years' exp - .NET Core / Backend Engineer with AI-First Development Approach)

About Us
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.
Job Description
Summary:
We are seeking a talented and motivated Staff Software Engineer to join our VERA - Learning Enablement Technology team. As a key member of the team, you will play a critical role in developing cutting-edge solutions, leveraging innovative technologies, and enhancing the capabilities of our Value-Added Services (VAS) platform.
You will be tasked to quickly grasp and evaluate new ideas and technologies from both internal and external sources and match them appropriately with emerging technology and business opportunities, building a culture of innovation and a drive for excellence.
Essential functionsClient-Focused Solutions
Architect, design, build, and maintain distributed, AI-augmented enterprise software platforms across .NET Core / .NET Framework (C#), Python, Java, Go, and C++ runtimes.
Translate business and product requirements into scalable, resilient system designs, and articulate architectural trade-offs (consistency vs. availability, latency vs. throughput, build vs. buy).
Lead architectural design reviews, code-quality standards, and code reviews across the VAS Innovation & Learning portfolio.
Troubleshoot complex production issues, drive root-cause analysis, and improve overall system reliability in alignment with Corporate Reliability Engineering (CRE) principles.
Partner with product management, design, security, and infrastructure teams to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
Contribute to automation, developer tooling, and Generative AI adoption across the engineering organization.
Mentor, coach, and technically guide junior and mid-level software engineers - pairing on complex tasks, delivering structured code-review feedback, teaching system-design, data-structures, algorithms and design-patterns fundamentals, and onboarding new team members.
Technology Modernization
Design and implement Generative AI capabilities embedded in enterprise learning and analytics products, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, conversational learner-support agents, and Large Language Model (LLM) integrations with proprietary Visa data sources.
Design, build, and integrate Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to expose Visa enterprise systems, APIs, knowledge repositories, and internal tools to AI agents under enterprise security controls (OAuth2.0, SSO, cryptographic key management).
Design AI Agent-based applications using the Microsoft Agent Framework, including multi-agent orchestration, agent lifecycle management, tool invocation, autonomous workflow automation, and human-in-the-loop patterns implemented in accordance with the Agent-User Interaction (AG-UI) protocol.
Design, author, and deploy Microsoft Declarative Agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot, including agent manifest authoring, instruction and capability definition, grounding against enterprise knowledge sources (SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Graph connectors, custom APIs), and integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility surfaces.
Design and implement Experience API (xAPI)-based learner-tracking pipelines for real-time analytics and gamification, using Apache Kafka for event-driven ingestion, Redis for in-memory state, MongoDB for document persistence, and Snowflake for cloud analytical data warehousing feeding Minerva and VCA Knowledge Xchange.
Adopt best-in-class AI/ML, data, and cloud technology solutions to expand platform capabilities.
Process Improvement
Continuously improve technology stacks, development processes, and methodologies to enhance productivity, quality, and time-to-market across the portfolio.
Drive polyglot standards, shared libraries, and reusable platform components spanning using C#, Python, Cline, VATC Anthropic and Gpt Models.
Engineering Excellence
Perform large-scale system-design and architecture work, including capacity planning, latency and throughput modeling, partitioning and sharding strategies, consistency and availability trade-offs, caching hierarchies, and selection of appropriate data structures and algorithms (arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, hash maps, heaps, trees, tries, graphs, and probabilistic data structures such as Bloom filters).
Apply object-oriented and enterprise software design patterns - creational (Factory, Builder, Singleton), structural (Adapter, Facade, Proxy, Decorator), behavioral (Strategy, Observer, Command, Chain of Responsibility), and distributed-system patterns (Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead, Saga, CQRS, Event Sourcing, Retry with Exponential Backoff) - to produce maintainable, testable, and extensible implementations.
Develop and maintain modern web front ends and back-ends for VisaUniversity.com and related SaaS applications using Angular, ReactJS, Node.js, Vue.js, Next.js, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and XML, integrated with RESTful APIs and web services.
Design, deploy, and operate Azure-hosted cloud workloads across Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery models, including hybrid Windows/IIS environments, containerized workloads orchestrated with Docker and Kubernetes, and administrative automation implemented in PowerShell.
Own release management and CI/CD pipelines for both application software and machine-learning model artifacts, implemented using Jenkins (including Groovy-based Jenkins pipeline libraries), GitHub Actions, and Git-based version control - covering automated build, test, security scanning, model-versioning, and progressive deployment stages.
Design and author automated test suites across the testing pyramid - unit tests, integration tests, regression tests, smoke tests, end-to-end tests, and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) / WCAG accessibility tests - and integrate these into CI/CD quality gates.
Apply enterprise security and Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC) practices, including cryptography fundamentals, authentication protocols (OAuth2.0, SSO), secure coding standards, and secure handling of AI/ML model inputs and outputs.
Identify, triage, and remediate security vulnerabilities in the codebase using Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tooling such as Checkmarx, Software Composition Analysis (SCA) for third-party and open-source dependencies, and container image scanning; enforce code-quality standards through static analysis, coverage thresholds, and pre-merge quality gates.
Write clean, maintainable code following established architecture and code governance principles.
Proactively manage and reduce technical debt across the portfolio.
Incident & Change Management
Establish and enforce observability, monitoring, and incident-response practices using Grafana, Splunk, and ThousandEyes.
Serve as release manager and provide on-call support for high-priority production incidents.
Support incident, change, and problem management processes to ensure high availability and reliability.
Participate in and lead root-cause analyses, blameless postmortems, and remediation tracking.
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 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.
Qualifications
Basic Qualifications:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field with 10+ years of relevant experience, or master’s degree with 8+ years.
Expert-level skills in C# on .NET Core and .NET Framework, with hands-on experience delivering enterprise SaaS and hosted applications in production.
Proficiency with AI/ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn) and data skills including large-dataset handling, preprocessing, feature engineering, and model evaluation.
Experience building Generative AI and conversational AI applications, including RAG architectures, NLP techniques, and integration into enterprise systems.
Familiarity with deep-learning concepts, including neural-network architectures and training procedures.
Experience designing and developing AI Agent-based applications using the Microsoft Agent Framework, including multi-agent orchestration, agent lifecycle management, tool integration, and autonomous workflow automation.
Experience designing, authoring, and deploying Microsoft Declarative Agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Strong understanding of the Agent-User Interaction (AG-UI) Protocol, with experience designing conversational experiences, agent communication patterns, context management, human-in-the-loop workflows, and user-centric AI interactions.
Hands-on experience designing, building, and integrating Model Context Pr