Our Purpose
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.
Title and Summary
Vice President, Software Engineering - PlatformWho is Mastercard?
Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. We work to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential.
Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.
Overview:
The Mastercard® Cross Border platform and services enable secure, near real-time payment transfers to and from billions of card, bank and digital accounts globally. Program Participants (banks, businesses, digital players and more) can modernize the way they send money cross-border, making funds available to recipients almost instantly. Mastercard Cross Border is proven to increase user spend and engagement, strengthening core business performance.
- Do you like to be part of a team that is creating and executing strategic initiatives centered around digital payments?
- Do you look forward to developing and engaging with high performant diverse teams around the globe?
- Would you like to be part of a highly visible, strategically important global engineering organization?
The Role:
The Platform Engineering lead is a senior leadership role responsible for building and maintaining the technology backbone that powers the organization’s applications and services. This includes overseeing frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, developer experience, observability, database engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and enterprise standards adoption. The ideal candidate is a strategic leader with deep technical expertise and a proven track record of delivering scalable, reliable, and secure platforms that enhance organizational efficiency and enable rapid innovation.
Key Responsibilities include
- Defining and implementing the vision, strategy, and roadmap for platform engineering to align with business objectives. Collaborating with cross-functional teams, including product, security, and infrastructure, ensures the platform meets organizational requirements. Staying ahead of emerging trends and technologies maintains competitive advantages and fosters innovation.
- Responsibilities also cover designing, building, and maintaining robust frameworks and tools to support software development and operations. Ensuring the platform architecture is scalable, fault-tolerant, and optimized for performance and cost.
- Overseeing the design and implementation of CI/CD pipelines enables seamless and reliable software delivery. Driving automation initiatives across build, testing, deployment, and monitoring processes fosters a DevOps culture, integrating infrastructure as code (IaC) and continuous improvement practices. Championing initiatives to improve the developer experience, including self-service tools, streamlined workflows, and onboarding processes, is also essential.
- Providing frameworks, libraries, and APIs empowers development teams to build, test, and deploy efficiently. Collaborating with developers to address pain points and incorporating feedback into platform enhancements is crucial.
- Establishing comprehensive observability practices, including logging, monitoring, tracing, and alerting, ensures platform and application performance metrics are tracked and actionable insights are derived. Implementing robust incident management and disaster recovery processes is vital.
- Overseeing non-functional testing practices ensures platform changes meet quality standards. Leading database design and optimization supports scalable and secure operations. Ensuring highly available, performance-tuned, and business-aligned database systems is critical. Collaborating with data engineering teams enables advanced analytics. Building and managing SRE practices ensure platform reliability and scalability, while establishing SLOs and SLIs monitors health. Proactive issue resolution through automation and continuous improvement is essential.
- Adopting & Enforcing adherence to enterprise-wide standards for security, compliance, and architecture is necessary. Conducting regular audits and reviews ensures platform systems meet regulatory and organizational policies.
All About You and What you need to bring:
• Product engineering experience that demonstrates thought-leadership and cross-functional influence demonstrated by a successful track record of enabling business through engineering excellence and technical innovation.
• Deep programming background in Java & distributed system architectures (databases, message brokers, cache, cloud-native microservices etc.)
• Progressively grown career with proven design and development experiences in multiple languages, secure coding standards (e.g., OWASP, CWE, SEI CERT), and vulnerability management.
• Expert understanding and experience of DevOps best practices to guide developers and abstract application development from underlying hosting platforms and infrastructure. Experience in Continuous Integration (CI) and Delivery (CD) concepts, and capabilities to support automation, pipelines, virtualization, and containerization.
• Experience in the skills required to implement advanced test set ups in production environment (e.g., A/B testing, canary releases, blue-green deployment, feature flags)
• Experience in leading the initiation and formation of large global projects including architecting, estimating, planning, implementing, and operating as well as selecting talent resources across multiple geographies and functions.
• Has skills to develop and evangelize on reference architecture and run principles to help teams adopt Engineering Principles from the start (poison pill, active/active/active, auto-scaling, self-healing, others)
• Understands use cases for advanced design patterns (e.g., service-to-worker, MVC, API gateway, intercepting filter, dependency injection, lazy loading, all from gang of four) to implement efficient code
• Understands and implements Application Programming Interface (API) standards and cataloging to drive API/service adoption and commercialization
• Deep understanding of CI/CD, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and IaC tools (Terraform, Ansible).
• Strong knowledge of observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk), non-functional testing frameworks, and SRE principles.
• Expertise in database design, optimization, and management across relational and NoSQL systems.
• Performance engineering experience to ensure applications are built to scale, run, and perform for varying demands
• Has skills to evaluate practices, metrics, and roles to continually optimize SDLC methodologies and automate processes to improve lead time and quality
• Has skills to succinctly articulate architecture patterns of complex systems, with business and technical implications, to executive and customer stakeholders
Corporate Security Responsibility
All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:
Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices;
Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;
Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and
Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.
