What it's all about - 

Visa Consulting & Analytics (VCA) is Visa’s global team of consultants, data scientists, economists, and subject matter experts that drives tangible, impactful, and measurable financial results for Visa’s clients—including financial institutions, issuers, acquirers, and merchants. Across Europe, VCA is organized into regional clusters spanning the UK & Ireland, South Europe, Nordics & Baltics, Central Eastern Europe, and Central Europe.

Within VCA, the AI Labs practice is a recently established, high-impact service line dedicated to helping Visa’s clients design, develop, and deploy AI-powered agentic solutions that automate and transform core payments and financial services processes. This team sits at the intersection of deep payments domain expertise and cutting-edge AI engineering—representing a significant strategic investment for Visa Consulting.

The Role

We are looking for a Manager who combines hands-on payments industry knowledge with deep functional expertise of AI agentic systems. This is not a pure AI engineering role. It is a hybrid position for someone who understands the business logic, regulatory complexity, and operational reality of payments and financial services—and who can translate that understanding into the design, evaluation, and deployment of agentic AI workflows for enterprise clients.

The ideal candidate thinks fluently across two registers: they can hold a strategic conversation with a bank’s head of payments about commercial card optimization, and then turn around to architect an agentic evaluation pipeline or design a RAG-based context retrieval system for a KYC automation use case. They are a practitioner, not a theorist—someone who has built and shipped agentic systems and understands the nuances of prompt engineering, agent orchestration, tool selection, memory management, and human-in-the-loop design in real enterprise environments.

What you will do

Client Engagement & Delivery

• Lead the end-to-end management and execution of AI agentic workflow engagements for Visa’s financial institution and merchant clients across Southern Europe, from initial discovery through deployment and post-launch optimization.
• Conduct structured assessments to identify client processes best suited for “agentization,” evaluating criteria such as heterogeneous document formats, multi-system integration needs, clear success metrics, and existing digital infrastructure.
• Design hybrid AI-human operating models that route routine tasks to agentic systems while preserving human oversight for complex, high-value, or regulatory-sensitive decisions.
• Translate complex payments domain requirements—PSD2/3 compliance, commercial card processing rules, cross-border settlement logic, authorization and authentication flows —into precise agent specifications, evaluation criteria, and system prompts.
• Manage internal and external resources to deliver projects on time and to VCA’s quality standards, including coordination with Visa’s technology and product teams.

AI Agentic System Design & Oversight

• Design agentic workflow architectures that incorporate prompt engineering, RAG/context construction, tool selection and orchestration, agent memory management, and guardrails for production-grade financial services environments.
• Develop and maintain rigorous evaluation frameworks—including confidence-aware assessment methods, AI-as-a-judge protocols, and human-in-the-loop quality gates—to ensure agent reliability, factuality, and compliance.
• Define and enforce systematic experimentation practices: prompt versioning, A/B evaluation, failure mode analysis, and continuous feedback loops that leverage production data to improve agent performance.
• Advise clients on technology stack decisions—comparing low-code platforms (e.g., Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Automate) against custom agentic development (LangGraph, LangChain, AI Labs APIs)—creating decision frameworks tailored to each client’s complexity, compliance, and scalability requirements.
• Stay current with the rapidly evolving agentic commerce protocol landscape, including Visa’s TAP and Intelligent Commerce platforms, OpenAI/Stripe ACP, Google AP2 and emerging standards—and translate developments into actionable client guidance.

Strategy, Business Development & Thought Leadership

• Co-lead go-to-market activities for the AI Agentic Workflows & Agentic Commerce service lines, including client workshops, capability demonstrations, sales presentations, and content development.
• Develop compelling client proposals that combine market intelligence (ROI projections, cost-benefit analyses, competitive benchmarking) with technically credible implementation plans.
• Build and deepen relationships with senior client stakeholders—from CIOs and CDOs to Heads of Operations—positioning VCA as their trusted advisor on agentic transformation.
• Contribute to the service line’s intellectual capital: frameworks, playbooks, reusable prompt libraries, evaluation benchmarks, and case studies that codify best practices.
• Support the professional development of junior consultants, mentoring them on both payments domain expertise and AI agentic design principles

Why this role

You will be joining a founding team building a rapidly-growing service line from the ground up within one of the world’s most influential payments networks. You will shape the methodology, define the market positioning, and deliver the engagements that establish Visa’s credibility in agentic AI for financial services.

• Be part of a high-visibility strategic initiative backed by Visa’s senior leadership, operating at the frontier of AI and payments.
• Work directly with C-level executives at Europe’s leading financial institutions on transformative agentic AI engagements.
• Access Visa’s unmatched payments data, global subject matter experts, and proprietary technology platforms.
• Help define the playbook for an entirely new consulting discipline—AI agentic workflows for financial services—with direct impact on Visa’s strategic roadmap.
• Shape and mentor a growing team of consultants at the intersection of payments and AI.
• Competitive compensation, Visa’s benefits package, relocation allowance, private health and dental care, and continuous learning opportunities.

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

What we'd like from you - 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience designing, building, or deploying AI-powered agentic workflows in an enterprise context ideally in financial services, but comparable regulated industries are also valued.
• Professional experience in payments, banking, or financial service with at least 3 years in a consulting, advisory, or strategy role.
• Master’s degree, or equivalent in Business, Economics, Finance, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Strong functional and semi-technical knowledge of the AI agentic stack, including:
• Prompt engineering: systematic prompt design, versioning, optimization, and evaluation for complex multi-step agent tasks.
• RAG & context construction: retrieval pipeline design, chunking strategies, embedding models, hybrid search (term-based + vector), and reranking.
• Agent orchestration: multi-agent architectures, tool selection and integration, ReAct/Reflexion patterns, and error correction loops.
• Memory & state management: short-term vs. long-term memory design, context window optimization, and conversation management.
• Evaluation & guardrails: evaluation-driven development (EDD), AI-as-a-judge frameworks, confidence scoring, hallucination detection, and human-in-the-loop quality gates.
• AI interfaces: experience designing user-facing AI applications (chatbots, copilots, browser extensions, agent-based tools).
• Familiarity with agentic frameworks and tooling such as LangGraph, LangChain, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK, Microsoft Copilot Studio, or equivalent.
• Understanding of inference optimization concepts (latency, throughput, cost management) and when to apply fine-tuning vs. prompt engineering vs. RAG.
• Payments & Financial Services Expertise
• Deep understanding of payments value chains: issuing, acquiring, processing, settlement, and the regulatory frameworks that govern them (PSD2, PSD3, MiCA, AML/KYC directives).
• Experience working with card networks, issuers, acquirers, or payment processors. Familiarity with commercial cards, cross-border payments, or other payment systems is a strong plus.
• Demonstrated ability to engage C-level executives at major financial institutions, translate business challenges into structured project scopes, and deliver high-impact consulting engagements.
• Professional & Leadership Skills
• Proven ability to manage multiple concurrent projects, balancing strategic advisory with hands-on technical oversight.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication in English. Spanish proficiency is highly valued. Additional European languages are a plus.
• Executive-level presentation and storytelling skills—comfortable presenting to C-suite audiences at Fortune 500 financial institutions.
• Experience mentoring and developing junior team members in both business consulting and technical AI capabilities.

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.