Payments giant Visa has revealed it is seeking to hire a software engineer to help it create a “secure, scalable blockchain network”.

The news was revealed in a job advertisement by Visa Research – a research arm created by the company to expand its technology capabilities.

Visa Research’s remit is to engage with the company’s technology and product teams, as well as business and other partners, to investigate and develop technologies that are “critical to the payments industry in the future”, the firm says.

As part of its efforts to build three research sections covering data analytics, security and ‘future of payments’, the ad seeks an “outstanding” senior staff software engineer for the payments team.

With a wide ranging scope that covers blockchain, QR codes, digital currency and other emerging payment technologies, the research team will reportedly work to develop a proof-of-concept for its blockchain network.

Skills and experience

Visa suggests the role represents an opportunity for a new hire to make “key contributions” to its innovation efforts in the payments industry.

Responsibilities include designing and developing the blockchain network, implementing machine learning algorithms and applications, and developing a proof-of-concept prototype with “fast iteration and experimentation”.

Among a long list of skills, candidates will require programming experience, cryptography and “competency in data structures, algorithms and software design optimized for building highly distributed and parallelized systems”. Experience at a commercial blockchain platform such as Chain “may be a plus”, it says.

The news comes as Visa’s interest in blockchain technologies escalates following its participation in Chain’s $30m funding round last September. In October 2015, the firm unveiled a new proof-of-concept that uses the bitcoin blockchain for recordkeeping.

That project, outlined in a blog post, focused on digitizing the process of leasing a car, with bitcoin transactions used to create a ‘digital fingerprint’ for each vehicle, and new transactions published throughout the leasing process.

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