Vice President (Basingstoke)

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

Reporting directly to the Senior Vice President of Global Operations, the Vice President of Payment Products Authorization Operations will play a critical role in 24/7 operations for key areas of our Payment Products division. Overseeing a global team of 100+ operations professionals that support real-time consumer payment applications and services, this role involves coordination across multiple global data centers and processing environments.

This role requires deep, hands-on leadership experience operating large-scale, real-time, high-availability platforms. The successful candidate will have directly owned production outcomes, major incident response, and operational risk in mature, highly regulated environments, where reliability, speed of decision-making, and judgment under pressure are critical.

Global Operations holds the responsibility of ensuring Visa's diverse portfolio of commercial services perform optimally, meeting stringent availability targets while exceeding client and ecosystem expectations. As Visa's authorization platforms increase in complexity and scale, Global Operations is evolving its operating model by architecting automation, Generative AI, and AIOps into its operational foundation. As part of this evolution, the organization is moving toward fully orchestrated, automated ways of working, where detection, triage, decision-support, and response are increasingly driven by integrated automation and intelligent systems rather than manual, siloed intervention.

Global Operations serves as the engine room of production operations - balancing extreme reliability with innovation, and ensuring Visa can operate confidently at five and six-nines availability. Working with highly integrated, high-throughput, real-time transaction processing systems, equal importance is placed on robust observability, intelligent event detection, and disciplined incident management. Global Operations defines and enforces operational standards that support today's business demands while adapting how work is done to meet the needs of tomorrow. Through blameless post-mortems, intellectual curiosity, and continuous problem-solving, the organization is actively transforming reactive operations into proactive and predictive capabilities, while creating an environment where team members can learn, grow, and evolve their roles over time.

In addition to the functional role, the Vice President of Payment Products Authorization Operations will fulfill the role of site lead for our Basingstoke UK campus. Basingstoke is a key strategic location for the Technology organization, home to more than 200 employees across the company, and features one of Visa's global data centers. As site lead, this role supports campus-wide engagement, facilities coordination, and employee advocacy to ensure a strong and inclusive workplace experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead a globally distributed team of approximately 100 authorization operations professionals, ensuring delivery of reliable, high-quality, 24/7 operational support.
• Own authorization operations for Visa's Payment Products, providing standardized, secure, and highly available platform services with availability targets of up to six nines.
• Provide continuous operational support in close partnership with Product Reliability Engineering and Infrastructure Reliability Engineering teams.
• Lead the Operational Acceptance of products and services onboarding into production, ensuring readiness, risk mitigation, and clear operational ownership.
• Develop strategic direction, workforce plans, and organizational design aligned with the evolution of authorization operations toward automation and AI-enabled models.
• Act as a senior leader within Visa's Global Operations organization, representing authorization operations in executive-level discussions and major incident scenarios.
• Bring demonstrated operational judgment from leading high-urgency, high-impact production environments, where outages or degradation have material business, client, or ecosystem impact.
• Serve as the senior operational decision-maker during major authorization incidents, balancing speed, risk containment, and long-term system integrity.
• Lead the design and adoption of fully orchestrated operational workflows, integrating observability, automation, AIOps, and incident management into cohesive, end-to-end operating patterns.
• Reduce reliance on manual handoffs and ad-hoc intervention by driving standardized, automated, and repeatable operational responses.
• Apply prior production operations experience to determine where automation, AIOps, and agentic capabilities should - and should not - replace human decision-making, with appropriate controls and escalation paths.
• Regularly produce and review key performance metrics with management, product teams, and client services partners.
• Establish dashboards and analytics for service health, operational effectiveness, and team performance.
• Lead customer success efforts through close partnership with Client Services and targeted client engagement.
• Define and execute the operational innovation strategy, embedding automation, Generative AI, AIOps, and emerging agentic capabilities into day-to-day operations while maintaining clear governance and human-in-the-loop controls.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 10+ years with an advanced degree (e.g., Master's, MBA), or 8+ years with a PhD.
• 5+ years of experience in software development (e.g., algorithms, data structures, systems design) and/or technology operations fundamentals (e.g., observability, event management, incident response, incident management).

Preferred Qualifications

• Relevant Operational Experience.
• Prior leadership experience running mission-critical, real-time platforms at global scale (e.g., payments, financial networks, transaction processing platforms, telecom, or similarly regulated environments).
• Direct accountability for 24x7 production operations, including incident leadership, escalation management, and post-incident learning.
• Experience operating in environments with five or six-nines availability expectations, where operational rigor and discipline are non-negotiable.

Additional Preferred Experience

• 15+ years of experience leading global teams and managing complex, cross-functional initiatives.
• Industry leadership experience in large-scale operational support for highly available systems.
• Experience operating and supporting mainframe-based payment processing platforms.
• Experience with microservices architectures and container-based platforms, including messaging, queuing, and caching technologies.
• Working knowledge of Generative AI, AIOps, and automation concepts, and experience applying them to improve operational outcomes and resilience.
• Experience designing or leading highly automated, orchestrated operations models, reducing manual effort while maintaining or improving reliability.
• Experience with IT Service Management (ITSM), including incident management, change management, operational metrics, and continuous improvement.
• Demonstrated ability to lead transformation in mature organizations, including guiding teams through role evolution and resistance to change.
• Proven ability to recruit, develop, retain, and motivate high-caliber technical talent.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to navigate complex, open-ended challenges and drive them to resolution.
• Ability to prioritize and execute in fast-paced, high-stakes environments with minimal direction.
• Strong leadership and people-management capabilities, including experience leading geographically distributed, multifunctional teams.
• Payments industry experience strongly preferred.
• Domain knowledge and expertise in commerce and payment systems and platforms.
• Experience with compliance requirements including PCI, SOX, SSAE/ISAE requirements.
• Experience with regulatory standards including FBA, BOE, RBI.

This is an on-site position. An on-site position must be consistently performed at an assigned Visa office location and require daily commute to the office location.

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.