Database Engineer - Sr. Consultant level

About Visa and Pismo

Visa’s Technology Organization is a community of problem solvers and innovators reshaping the future of commerce. We operate one of the world’s most sophisticated processing networks, supporting secure transactions at global scale.

Pismo is a cloud‑native financial services company operating as part of Visa. We build and deliver scalable payment and banking services for financial institutions worldwide. Our platforms demand strong correctness, resilience, security, and performance—especially in our data stores and database platforms.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Senior Consultant Database Architect—a senior individual contributor who acts as a technical authority and architectural leader for Pismo’s database and data storage ecosystem.

In this role you will define database architecture and standards across teams, lead work where requirements are ambiguous or evolving, and be accountable for database outcomes end‑to‑end: from logical and physical design through implementation, performance, reliability, security, operations, and adoption.

While this is a hands‑on role, your impact will increasingly come from technical direction, design leadership, mentoring, and raising the bar across the organization.

What You'll Do

Database Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Define and evolve database architecture strategies across Pismo, including data modeling standards, schema governance, indexing strategies, partitioning/sharding approaches, and lifecycle management.
• Act as a technical authority for database design decisions, guiding teams toward scalable, maintainable, and secure patterns.
• Lead architecture for database systems supporting high-throughput, low-latency, highly available financial services.
• Drive pragmatic trade-offs balancing performance, resilience, correctness, cost, and developer productivity.

End-to-End Ownership (Design to Production to Adoption)

• Own database initiatives across the full lifecycle: requirements discovery, design, proof-of-concept, implementation guidance, rollout, operationalization, and ongoing improvement.
• Establish and enforce non-functional requirements for data systems: availability, RPO/RTO, performance SLOs, backup/restore, disaster recovery, and capacity planning.
• Partner with engineering teams to ensure production readiness: runbooks, monitoring/alerting, on-call enablement, and safe change management.

Reliability, Security & Compliance by Design

• Architect secure database solutions with strong access controls, encryption, auditing, data retention, and privacy-aware design.
• Define safe practices for schema changes, data migrations, and online maintenance, minimizing downtime and reducing operational risk.
• Improve observability and incident response for data systems through standard metrics, tracing patterns (where applicable), and operational playbooks.

Organizational Impact & Cross-Team Influence

• Influence technical roadmaps and priorities by identifying systemic issues in data architecture and platform capabilities.
• Collaborate across Product, Platform, Security, and Application squads to ensure database designs support business goals and delivery timelines.
• Break down large database initiatives into phased milestones, guiding teams through delivery with clear architectural checkpoints.

Mentorship, Culture & Hiring

• Mentor engineers at scale via design reviews, query and schema reviews, pairing on complex problems, and coaching teams on best practices.
• Be a steward of engineering culture—raise the quality bar for data design and operational discipline.
• Participate actively in hiring and interviewing to ensure Pismo continues to build deep expertise in database architecture.

External Influence (Optional, Encouraged)

• Contribute to technical talks, blog posts, or community engagement to strengthen Pismo’s external engineering brand and bring modern database practices into the organization.

Essential Functions

• Partner with product and engineering leaders to translate business requirements into sound data architecture and durable database designs.
• Produce and socialize reference architectures, patterns, and standards that improve consistency across teams.
• Lead and/or review designs for:
  • Relational data modeling (normalization vs denormalization, constraints, consistency models)
  • NoSQL/document modeling (where applicable), access patterns, and data lifecycle strategies
  • High availability / multi-region approaches, replication, and DR planning
  • Performance optimization (indexes, query plans, caching strategies, connection management)
• Establish measurable outcomes and dashboards for database performance, reliability, and operational health.

The Skills You Bring

Senior Consultant Behaviors

• Proven ability to operate with high autonomy, including leading initiatives where the problem is not fully defined.
• Track record of influencing standards across multiple teams and driving adoption through clear communication and technical credibility.
• Strong ownership mindset: accountable for outcomes, not just design artifacts.

Database & Data Architecture Expertise

• Deep experience designing and operating production database systems at scale (e.g., PostgreSQL/MySQL and/or modern cloud database services. Plus experience with a relevant NoSQL store is a plus).
• Strong foundation in data modeling, schema evolution, indexing, partitioning/sharding, replication, and consistency trade-offs.
• Demonstrated expertise in performance tuning and diagnosing production issues (query plans, lock contention, hotspots, capacity limits).
• Experience designing for multi-region resilience, backup/restore, DR, and safe deployment of schema/data changes.

Engineering & Collaboration

• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineers, product partners, and leadership.
• Comfort working in multi-functional teams (Product, Security, SRE/Platform, QA, Agile/Scrum).
• Hands-on ability to prototype, review code, and guide implementations in one or more languages (e.g., Java, Go, Python).

Nice to Have

• Experience with database platform engineering (golden paths, self-service provisioning, standardized tooling).
• Familiarity with data governance concepts (cataloging, lineage, retention policies) in a regulated environment.
• Experience leading large-scale data migrations or modernization programs.

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

- Familiarity and experience working with relational and non-relational databases
- Familiarity and experience building database automation
- Familiarity and experience with data concepts such as consistency and idempotency
- Familiarity and experience working with Azure cloud services
- Experience leading teams of technical professionals

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 152,200.00 to 243,700.00 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.