Vice President, Software Engineering

Mastercard

About The Position

Mastercard is recruiting a Vice President of Software Engineering to lead software engineering teams developing advanced technologies and applications for payments. The role oversees engineering quality, platform stability, technology modernization, AI adoption, and the development of engineering leaders across geographies. The successful candidate will work with Product, Operations, Site Reliability Engineering, Architecture, Security, Business stakeholders, and senior executives to deliver secure, reliable, scalable, and high-performing solutions. The position owns release quality and platform health; defines and executes modernization efforts across legacy, cloud-native, hybrid, microservices, API-first, and event-driven environments; and advances AI-enabled engineering capabilities with responsible governance. It also establishes a quality-first, accountable, collaborative engineering culture; develops talent and succession; and provides executive-level visibility into risks, quality, delivery, and modernization. The role includes managing strategic vendor and partner relationships. The Vice President is expected to be a hands-on technical and people leader, able to lead directly and through other managers. The position requires strong judgment, communication, collaboration, and organizational skills, as well as expertise in distributed systems, software development practices, Agile, TDD, DDD, and application lifecycle management. The role also requires payments and card industry knowledge and the ability to understand business cases. Anyone working for or on behalf of Mastercard is responsible for protecting the company’s information, assets, and networks by following security policies, maintaining confidentiality and integrity, reporting suspected security violations or breaches, and completing required security training.

Requirements

Be a hands-on technical and people leader able to manage directly and through others.
Have recognized subject matter expertise and the ability to dive deeply into teams’ work.
Build trust with teams, peers, and management.
Be high-energy, detail-oriented, proactive, and adaptive in a dynamic environment.
Have strong verbal and written communication skills for a wide range of audiences.
Focus on results and communicate objectives and measures of success clearly.
Have strong decision-making skills and a bias for action.
Lead retrospection and continually improve.
Have strong collaborative and organizational skills and value transparency.
Guide team members’ careers through performance evaluation, coaching, and motivation.
Have experience managing and coaching other managers.
Have experience in distributed system design and implementation, including understanding how high-performance, high-reliability, large-scale distributed systems are built and operated.
Have expert-level knowledge of software development processes and advanced Agile practices.
Have experience and knowledge of Test Driven Development and Domain Driven Development (TDD/DDD).
Have experience using one or more Application Lifecycle Management tools, such as Rally or Jira.
Have payments/card industry knowledge and the ability to read and understand a business case.
Abide by Mastercard security policies and practices, protect information confidentiality and integrity, report suspected security violations or breaches, and complete periodic mandatory security training.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end release quality and safeguard customer experience and platform trust across deployments.
Establish and enforce testing standards, release readiness criteria, and go/no-go decision frameworks.
Drive risk management and defect containment, including early detection, root-cause analysis, and preventive actions.
Lead quality governance across development, testing, and production operations to ensure stable and predictable releases.
Promote engineering accountability for production health, incident reduction, and operational excellence.
Partner with Product, Operations, and SRE teams to ensure resilience, observability, and recoverability.
Define and execute a technology modernization roadmap that reduces technical debt and improves scalability, resilience, and efficiency.
Lead legacy platform modernization and transformation toward cloud-native and hybrid architectures, microservices, API-first systems, and event-driven systems.
Improve engineering productivity, deployment velocity, and cost efficiency.
Ensure architectural consistency, security, and compliance across platforms and regions.
Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies aligned with long-term business and platform strategy.
Drive AI adoption across engineering, including development, testing, operations, and decision-making.
Sponsor AI-enabled test automation, intelligent defect detection, predictive analytics for risk and capacity management, and AI-assisted development and productivity tools.
Partner with business and data leaders to ensure AI produces measurable outcomes.
Establish responsible AI practices covering governance, explainability, security, and ethical use.
Lead, mentor, and inspire senior engineering leaders and managers across geographies.
Build a culture of quality-first engineering, ownership, continuous learning, and innovation.
Develop succession planning, upskilling strategies, and cross-functional talent mobility.
Foster collaboration across Product, Architecture, Operations, Security, and Business stakeholders.
Serve as a trusted engineering partner to senior executives and provide visibility into risk, quality, delivery, and modernization progress.
Communicate complex technical topics concisely to executive audiences.
Manage strategic vendor and partner relationships to support delivery excellence and innovation.
Protect Mastercard information, assets, and networks by following security policies, preserving confidentiality and integrity, reporting suspected violations or breaches, and completing mandatory security training.