Innovation Architect, Senior Manager

Company Description

Visa is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating more than 215 billion payments transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive.

When you join Visa, you join a culture of purpose and belonging – where your growth is priority, your identity is embraced, and the work you do matters. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere. Your work will have a direct impact on billions of people around the world – helping unlock financial access to enable the future of money movement.

Join Visa: A Network Working for Everyone.

Job Description

What we expect of you, day to day.

• Work in a cross-functional team of product managers, propositions leads, designers, developers and project managers that are developing solutions to client / market problems.
• Lead development of the vision for the technical dimension of the solution (the innovation architecture) by using inputs from the cross-functional team to:
  • Take a user journey as a starting point and identify the below the line Visa and client capabilities / resources required to support that journey.
  • Create sequence / collaboration / process models & diagrams that describe how those resources and capabilities work together, paying particular attention to the data items passing between tasks / activities and the roles / responsibilities of Visa and clients in making the technical dimension of the solution work.
  • Translate these models and diagrams into a set of architecture user stories that can be added to the product backlog.
  • Refine the stories further by leading ideation / backlog grooming sessions with the Visa / partner development teams that will implement them.   
• Ensure that the innovation architecture complies with all data privacy, regulatory and operational requirements and demonstrate that the solution is feasible from these perspectives.
• Develop a strong partnership with the European and Global design teams. Use that relationship to make sure that the innovation architecture stretches the technical art of the possible in the direction of delivering a best in class user experience i.e. the innovation architecture should not act as an inhibitor to UX but as an enabler.
• Identifying gaps in product capabilities / features and working with partners / internal Visa teams to address. This involves:
  • Getting the sponsorship from these teams to develop the missing capabilities / features by aligning product roadmaps.
  • Expressing requirements for the missing capabilities / features as a set of user stories
  • Supporting the teams in ideation / backlog grooming sessions to refine the user stories to a point where they can be developed.
• Present the innovation architecture to any stakeholder, in particular supporting the NBIA and contractual conversations by responding to questions on the technical dimension of the solution.
• Work with the cross-functional team to take solutions from definition, validation into pilot and then to commercialization.
• Lead the technical aspect of client conversations and where appropriate take feedback from the client and update models, diagrams and user stories, to improve the innovation architecture.
• Filing an invention disclosure when there appears to be novelty in the technical solution being proposed.
• Keeping up to date with product developments in Visa and industry working groups e.g. Open Banking, FIDO, to ensure that the innovation architecture is appropriately aligned.

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 2-3 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

• A deep knowledge of the card payment industry and Visa products in particular.
• Mid to senior level experience of innovation architecture in the card payment industry.
• Extensive experience of being a member of teams that operate using agile working methodologies and principles, and in particular experience of creating user stories according to the INVEST methodology.
• Strong stakeholder management and negotiation skills with clients/vendors/internal teams and experience of procurement processes and contract management.
• Strong technical skills, including the ability to code to APIs and prove out the early stage technical feasibility of an architecture. Other technical skills to include, MS Office (particularly MS Visio), PowerPoint, JIRA/Wiki, EA Sparx.
• Proactive, enthusiastic and passionate about emerging technologies and trends, with extensive experience in working with developers and technical teams. A good understanding and willingness to apply Human Centered Design (Design Thinking, sprints, etc.) principles to your work.
• A self-starter who is able to work well in a fast-paced, fun and creative team environment but is able to work independently as well.
• A passion for solving the problems of the future through innovation, technology & design to build better businesses for the future.
• Program /project management skills would be preferred but not mandatory.

Additional Information

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.