Senior Vice President, Services Enterprise Architecture

Mastercard•Arlington, VA

About The Position

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential. Overview We are seeking a visionary technology leader to define and scale the architectural foundation for Mastercard Services. This role leads a high‑impact team of architects and partners deeply with Product, Engineering, and Mastercard’s Technology Leadership to create the patterns, platforms, and guardrails that enable thousands of engineers to build secure, reliable, and scalable products with speed. It sets the long‑range technical direction for our technology ecosystem, driving simplification, accelerating modernization, and codifying best‑practice architecture into reusable golden paths and automation. As part of the team overseeing broad technology transformation, this leader will shape the Services Technology Team’s evolution in how it designs, integrates, and operates its technology at scale, ensuring that the right way to build becomes the fastest and safest way to build. Role The SVP of Services Enterprise Architecture is the senior technology leader responsible for defining, evolving, and scaling the architectural foundation for Mastercard’s Services organization. This role sets the long‑range technical direction for how the Services organization builds, integrates, and operates its portfolio of products. It ensures our technology ecosystem is simple, scalable, secure, and aligned to enterprise principles without compromising delivery velocity. This leader will lead a lean, high‑leverage team of cross‑cutting architects who define target states, golden paths, guardrails, and modernization strategies, and operates the architecture system (patterns, policy‑as‑code, alignment mechanisms) that enables thousands of engineers across the globe to move quickly and safely. They’ll partner closely with Product and Engineering executives across Services and collaborate with Enterprise Architecture & Technology Leadership to drive simplification and cloud‑forward modernization across the Services ecosystem. The SVP must be a pragmatic strategist, a strong systems thinker, and an influential leader capable of shaping architecture at scale through clarity, patterns, and automation.

Requirements

Proven experience in large-scale engineering or architecture leadership roles; deep background in cloud-native distributed systems, container platforms, and modern runtime environments.
Track record defining and delivering target architecture and modernization at global scale (1,000+ engineers).
Strong expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), microservices, distributed and event-drive architectures, enterprise data platforms, identity, security and integration patterns.
Demonstrated ability to build golden paths, platform patterns, IaC modules, and automation-based guardrails.
Demonstrated success influencing engineering and product leaders without relying on hierarchy.
Experience operating in a federated architecture model with embedded architects and decentralized engineering teams.
Exceptional systems thinking with the ability to connect infrastructure, application, data, security, and AI platform strategies into a cohesive technology ecosystem.
Bias for pragmatic, developer-centric solutions over theoretical or bureaucratic approaches.
Ability to attract, develop, and retain top-tier architecture talent.

Responsibilities

Define and own the Services target architecture, modernization strategy, cloud-native transformation roadmap and multi‑year technical strategy.
Lead and develop the Core Services Architecture team (cross-cutting technical domain architects + strategists).
Create and maintain golden paths, reference architectures, platform engineering standards, IaC modules, and policy‑as‑code guardrails.
Establish cross‑team alignment mechanisms; drive consistency without centralized review boards.
Translate Enterprise Technology principles into developer‑friendly patterns and automated controls for Services teams while enabling AI-ready and data-centric architectures across the portfolio.
Partner with Engineering and Product executives to ensure architecture supports business outcomes, real-time processing, scale, reliability, and speed.
Drive platform consolidation, simplification, and technology lifecycle management across Services.
Provide architectural leadership for high‑impact, irreversible, or multi‑platform decisions.
Coach and empower Product/Platform Architects across Services; build a strong architecture community.
Represent Services architecture in executive forums and influence enterprise‑level technology direction.

Benefits

insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance)
flexible spending account and health savings account
16 weeks of new parent leave
up to 20 days of bereavement leave
80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time
25 days of vacation time
5 personal days
10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays
401k with a best-in-class company match
deferred compensation for eligible roles
fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities
eligibility for tuition reimbursement