Staff Database Engineer - MongoDB, SQL, Kafka

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.

We are seeking a highly skilled Software Engineer to own and support all SQL, Kafka, and AMQ‑related responsibilities within our engineering ecosystem. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in data‑driven environments, understands distributed messaging systems, and can deliver reliable, scalable data solutions across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Design, write, and optimize complex SQL queries, stored procedures, and database schemas to support application and analytics needs.
• Monitor database performance, identify bottlenecks, and implement tuning strategies (indexes, query restructuring, partitioning).
• Ensure data integrity, consistency, and security across all SQL‑related operations, including backups, migration scripts, and auditing.
• Build, maintain, and scale Kafka topics, partitions, schemas, and consumer/producer configurations.
• Develop and optimize Kafka producers and consumers, ensuring reliable, high‑throughput, low‑latency streaming pipelines.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting for Kafka clusters, including lag analysis and message flow diagnostics.
• Manage and configure AMQ messaging components (queues, topics, durable subscriptions) to support asynchronous workflows.
• Develop and maintain message producers/consumers for AMQ, ensuring resilient delivery, retry logic, and error‑handling patterns.
• Oversee reliability, observability, and fault‑tolerance of all messaging systems (Kafka and AMQ), including failover, scaling, and disaster recovery considerations.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to design event‑driven architectures, ensure proper data contracts, and integrate SQL/Kafka/AMQ components into larger platform services.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in the office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager. 

Basic Qualifications:

• 7+ years of relevant work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 5+ years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 3+ years of work experience with a PhD, OR 7+ years of relevant work experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong focus on backend or data intensive systems.
• Expert level proficiency in SQL, relational database design, and performance tuning techniques (indexing, partitioning, query optimization).
• Hands on experience managing and operating Kafka clusters, including topic configuration, consumer groups, schema management, and throughput optimization.
• Strong experience building and maintaining Kafka producers and consumers using languages such as Java, Python, Go, or Scala.
• Solid experience with AMQ or comparable messaging platforms (ActiveMQ, AMQ Artemis, Red Hat AMQ), including queue/topic configuration and message flow troubleshooting.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts such as event driven architecture, message delivery guarantees, and high availability design.
• Proficiency with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk) for diagnosing SQL and messaging system performance.
• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes) for deploying data and messaging services.
• Strong problem solving skills with the ability to debug complex system interactions across databases, messaging layers, and application code.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work cross functionally and document architectural decisions clearly.

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.