Senior Consultant - Technology Risk Management

About the role

The Global Technology Risk team provides independent second-line oversight of technology availability, reliability, operational resilience, and recovery capabilities across Visa's critical services and infrastructure. The team partners closely with Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Architecture, Incident Management, Business Continuity, and Technology Risk stakeholders globally to assess and strengthen the resiliency of Visa's technology ecosystem.

This role combines deep technical expertise with technology risk management to evaluate whether critical systems are designed, operated, monitored, and recovered within established service objectives and risk tolerances. The successful candidate will be capable of translating complex technical risks into meaningful business impacts while providing independent challenge and oversight of engineering controls and resilience practices.

The ideal candidate possesses hands-on experience supporting large-scale distributed systems and production environments and can effectively assess technology risks using technical evidence and data-driven analysis.

Key Responsibilities

Availability & Reliability Risk Oversight

• Independently assess availability, reliability, and resilience risks across critical services, cloud platforms, infrastructure, applications, and third-party dependencies.
• Evaluate technology risks in relation to service criticality, customer impact, operational resilience requirements, and Visa's risk appetite.
• Provide effective challenge and oversight of engineering processes, reliability practices, and control effectiveness.

Risk Assessment & Control Assurance

• Develop and execute risk-based assurance reviews focused on availability, reliability, and operational resilience controls.
• Assess both design adequacy and operating effectiveness of technology controls using objective technical evidence.
• Define testing methodologies, sampling approaches, evidence requirements, and assessment criteria.
• Review system configurations, telemetry, deployment records, incident data, recovery testing results, and operational metrics to validate control performance.
• Use scripting, automation, and data analysis techniques to support repeatable testing and evidence-based conclusions.
• Document findings, assess residual risk, and validate remediation activities through closure.

Incident Learning & Recovery Assurance

• Review significant service disruptions, recurring incidents, near misses, and post-incident analyses.
• Evaluate the quality of root cause analysis, contributing factors, customer impact assessments, and corrective action plans.
• Assess disaster recovery, resilience testing, and recovery-exercise outcomes to ensure alignment with recovery objectives and resilience expectations.

Reliability Metrics & Risk Reporting

• Define, monitor, and report key risk indicators (KRIs) and reliability metrics related to service availability and operational resilience.
• Assess trends related to SLO attainment, outage frequency and duration, error-budget consumption, recovery performance, change failure rates, capacity utilization, and control deficiencies.
• Prepare executive-level reporting and risk insights for technology governance forums, senior leadership, and risk committees.
• Communicate business exposure, emerging risks, remediation progress, and reliability trends in a clear and concise manner.

AI-Enabled Risk Analysis & Assurance

• Leverage approved AI and automation capabilities to improve analysis of incident data, control evidence, technical documentation, and testing activities.
• Validate AI-generated outputs through independent review and source evidence verification.
• Ensure appropriate governance, traceability, data protection, and human accountability within AI-supported assurance processes.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Build effective partnerships across Engineering, SRE, Architecture, Cybersecurity, Business Continuity, and Technology Risk teams.
• Influence stakeholders to strengthen reliability, resilience, and control maturity across critical technology services.
• Provide subject matter expertise and independent challenge during risk reviews, resilience assessments, and remediation discussions.

Basic Qualifications

• 8 or more years of relevant work experience with a bachelor's degree, OR 5 or more years of relevant work experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g., Master's, MBA, JD, MD), OR 2 or more years of work experience with a PhD, OR 11 or more years of relevant work experience.
• Hands-on experience in Software Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Production Engineering, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or a comparable role supporting business-critical systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, databases, cloud infrastructure, observability platforms, service dependencies, high availability architectures, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.
• Experience conducting technology risk assessments and evaluating the effectiveness of technical controls.
• Demonstrated ability to perform control testing, evidence evaluation, issue documentation, and remediation validation.
• Proficiency with scripting or data analysis tools such as Python, SQL, or equivalent technologies.
• Ability to interpret operational telemetry, reliability metrics, and technical evidence to assess risks and control effectiveness.
• Practical understanding of AI-assisted analysis and automation techniques, including associated risks such as hallucinations, bias, and data leakage.
• Strong written, verbal, and executive-level communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting highly available, large-scale production environments and critical customer-facing services.
• Experience participating in incident response, post-incident reviews, reliability engineering initiatives, capacity planning, resilience testing, or disaster recovery exercises.
• Experience independently presenting risk assessments and evidence-based findings to senior engineering leaders, risk committees, auditors, or regulators.
• Working knowledge of industry frameworks such as NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), NIST SP 800-53, ISO 27001, ISO 22301, COBIT, or related operational resilience standards.
• Experience applying risk and resilience frameworks to technical environments beyond compliance-based assessments.
• Experience in payments, financial services, fintech, or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience assessing cloud-native architectures and large-scale distributed technology platforms.
• Experience applying AI, automation, or analytics capabilities to technology risk management, engineering analysis, or control assurance activities.
• Experience working within a global matrixed organization.

Pay and benefits

For roles located in the US, the estimated salary range for this position is $146,300.00 to $ 234,400.00 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.

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.