Director Solution Architect - Global Growth Initiatives

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

Overview:

Visa is a global leader in digital payments. Our goal is to connect people and businesses through a secure and reliable payment network, helping economies grow. We focus on new technology to make digital payments simple and accessible for everyone, everywhere.

At Visa, we value each person's uniqueness. Working here gives you the opportunity to make a difference, develop your career, and join a welcoming, diverse team. We are innovators working to improve financial access and digital payments for people worldwide, including those who have never had access to these services before.

What’s it all about:

Visa Government Solutions (VGS) supports governments as they modernise payments, improve citizen experiences, protect public funds, and build trusted digital ecosystems. Governments are among the largest contributors to payment flows in every market and are investing heavily in digital transformation, financial inclusion, fraud prevention, digital identity, AI and resilient public infrastructure.

The purpose of this role is to provide the technical solution architecture, partner ecosystem and platform commercialisation capability that underpins the Growth Initiatives operating model, helping transform government opportunities into scalable growth platforms.

The role is strategic, highly technical and commercially focused. It sits within the Global Growth Initiatives team and works across priority areas including: Citizen Wallets, Visa Protect for Government, Financial Risk Indicators, Digital Identity, AI for Government, and future growth platforms and incubation opportunities.

The successful candidate will help opportunities move from qualification to lighthouse to repeatable scale through robust technical architecture, commercial design and ecosystem enablement.

What we expect of you, day to day:

This role is crucial in helping VGS convert strategic opportunities into practical, scalable solutions. The ideal candidate should have over 10 years of experience working in technical solutioning roles within payments, financial services, government technology or adjacent sectors, and be comfortable operating between architecture, pre-sales, partnerships and commercialisation.

Strong commercial skills are needed alongside expertise in solution architecture, technical feasibility assessment, platform design and ecosystem strategy. The role is hands-on and consultative, requiring the ability to work directly with governments, partners, regional teams and product owners to design solutions that can scale across multiple markets.

The solutions this role supports are varied and may include Value Added Services (VAS),  fraud and risk solutions, AI-enabled government services, payments modernisation, acceptance, merchant and citizen ecosystems, digital issuance, money movement, platform services and new forms of public-sector infrastructure.

Key responsibilities:

• Collaborate with global and regional teams to design scalable government growth platforms and commercial solution frameworks.
• Define reusable architecture patterns, integration approaches and deployment models across priority Growth Initiatives.
• Lead technical assessment of opportunities, including feasibility, implementation complexity and readiness for scale.
• Support strategic sales and pre-sales teams by shaping solution architectures, ecosystem models and GTM approaches.
• Design cross-capability solution architectures that combine Visa products, Value Added Services and partner capabilities into coherent government propositions.
• Design partner ecosystems and pathways covering distribution, capability, delivery and commercial routes-to-market, while assessing the technical and commercial viability of prospective partners and supporting partnership solutioning across both the Global CoE and regional teams.
• Work with Product, Technology, Risk, VAS, Advisory and regional teams to identify capability gaps and recommend scalable solutions.
• Create reusable reference architectures, solution patterns and deployment playbooks that can be reused across markets.
• Conduct architecture and risk reviews and recommend changes to products, platforms or partner approaches where required.
• Translate government technology requirements into Visa capability, product and prioritisation recommendations.
• Support lighthouse deployments, define technical success criteria, and determine readiness to scale, rework, pause or stop opportunities.
• Influence future platform and product direction through ongoing engagement with government clients, partners and regional teams.

Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.


Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• 10 or more years of work experience with a bachelor’s degree or at least 8 years of work experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters/MBA/JD/MD) or at least 3 years of work experience with a PhD.
• Strong communication, presentation and stakeholder-management skills.
• Significant experience in solution architecture, pre-sales, technical consulting, payments, fraud/risk, digital identity, cybersecurity or government technology.
• Ability to combine technical architecture expertise with commercialization and GTM thinking.
• Proven experience translating client needs into scalable solution designs and product requirements.
• Strong understanding of APIs, integration patterns, ecosystems, SaaS platforms, cloud architectures and modern digital infrastructure.
• Experience working across governments, regulated industries or large public-sector programmes.
• Experience supporting strategic partnerships, evaluating partner capabilities, designing ecosystem-led solutions, and working with systems integrators, GovTechs and multi-party delivery models.
• Demonstrated ability to influence cross-functional teams in a complex matrix environment.
• Proven ability to work through ambiguity and convert concepts into actionable recommendations.
• Strong problem-solving skills with a track record of shaping scalable solutions rather than bespoke deployments.
• Demonstrated leadership capability and experience leading complex initiatives across multiple stakeholders and geographies.

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.