Site Reliability Engineer - Senior Consultant

Visa Visa · Fintech · Austin, TX

Visa is seeking a Senior Consultant, Site Reliability Engineering to act as a technical leader, architect, and force multiplier within Pismo, a cloud-native financial services platform. This role requires high autonomy, end-to-end ownership of complex systems, and the ability to define technical direction and set engineering standards. The individual will lead initiatives, own systems across their full lifecycle, drive improvements in monitoring and incident response, and mentor other engineers. The role involves collaboration with Product, Engineering, Security, and Platform teams, and requires deep expertise in distributed, cloud-native systems, programming languages, cloud platforms, and observability.

What you'd actually do

  1. Act as a technical authority for reliability, scalability, and operational excellence within your domain.
  2. Define and evolve architecture and engineering standards adopted across multiple teams.
  3. Lead initiatives where the problem space is ambiguous, identifying gaps, defining solutions, and driving them to completion.
  4. Own systems and platforms across their full lifecycle: design, implementation, deployment, operations, and ongoing evolution.
  5. Act as a mentor at scale, leveling up engineers through code reviews, design discussions, pairing, and technical guidance.

Skills

Required

  • Proven experience operating as a senior individual contributor on complex, distributed, cloud-native systems.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead without authority, influencing technical direction across teams.
  • Comfort operating with high ambiguity, defining problems as well as solutions.
  • Strong sense of ownership and accountability for outcomes, not just delivery.
  • Deep expertise in at least one general-purpose programming language (e.g., Java, Go, Python, JavaScript).
  • Strong background in designing and operating highly reliable, scalable systems.
  • Hands-on experience with modern cloud platforms and tooling (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines).
  • Solid understanding of observability, incident management, and production operations at scale.
  • Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineers, product partners, and leadership.
  • Experience working closely with Product, QA, DevOps, and Agile teams.
  • Track record of mentoring and growing other engineers.

Nice to have

  • External Influence (Optional but Encouraged)
  • Represent Pismo externally through technical talks, articles, or community engagement.
  • Contribute to industry conversations around reliability engineering, cloud platforms, and large-scale distributed systems.

What the JD emphasized

  • high autonomy
  • thrive in ambiguity
  • take end-to-end ownership
  • deep technical expertise
  • high ambiguity
  • strong sense of ownership and accountability