Vice President, Software Engineering

Job Title:

Vice President, Software Engineering

Overview:

Overview:
At Mastercard, our industry expertise is enhanced by our commitment to being a force for good in the world and to doing well by doing good. Mastercard relies on our global workforce to help us achieve our goal of building a sustainable, inclusive global economy. The Mastercard Way encourages us, connects us with the behaviors that represent the essence of not only what we do but who we are as an organization. Cultivating an environment for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views and experiences drives a global and collaborative culture of inclusion and sense of belonging.
MasterCard is recruiting a Vice President of Software Engineering to lead software engineering teams developing advanced technologies and applications that are revolutionizing payments. MasterCard software engineering teams leverage Agile development principles, advanced development and design practices, and an obsession over security, reliability, and performance to deliver solutions that delight our customers.
Are you passionate about software engineering?
Are you fanatical about building large scale, distributed systems the right way?
Do you want to help software engineers to build better quality software faster?
Do you firmly believe that code talks, and just about anything else walks?
Do you want to join a Company that offers a competitive benefits-and rewards program that attracts, develops and retains the most talented employees around the world?
Do you want to join an inclusive culture where employees, in all their diversity, feel valued, respected and who can bring their authentic selves to work? Learn more at Mastercard’s Corporate Sustainability Report.
Key Responsibility:
1. Release Quality & Platform Stability
Own end‑to‑end release quality, safeguarding customer experience and platform trust across all deployments.
Establish and enforce rigorous testing standards, release readiness criteria, and go/no‑go decision frameworks.
Drive risk management and defect containment strategies, including early detection, root‑cause analysis, and preventive actions.
Lead quality governance across development, testing, and production operations—ensuring predictable, stable releases.
Champion engineering accountability for production health, incident reduction, and operational excellence.
Partner with Product, Operations, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to ensure resilience, observability, and recoverability.
2. Modernization & Technology Evolution
Define and execute the technology modernization roadmap, reducing technical debt while improving scalability, resilience, and efficiency.
Lead transformation initiatives including:
Legacy platform modernization
Cloud‑native and hybrid architectures
Microservices, API‑first, and event‑driven systems
Drive continuous improvement in 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.
3. AI & Intelligent Automation Leadership
Drive AI adoption across the engineering organization, embedding intelligence into development, testing, operations, and decision‑making.
Sponsor AI‑enabled capabilities such as:
Test automation and intelligent defect detection
Predictive analytics for risk and capacity management
AI‑assisted development and productivity tools
Partner with business and data leaders to ensure AI delivers measurable outcomes, not experimentation alone.
Establish responsible AI practices—governance, explainability, security, and ethical use.
4. Engineering Leadership & Culture
Lead, mentor, and inspire senior engineering leaders and managers across geographies.
Build a culture of quality-first engineering, ownership, continuous learning, and innovation.
Develop strong succession planning, upskilling strategies, and cross‑functional talent mobility.
Foster collaboration across Product, Architecture, Operations, Security, and Business stakeholders.
5. Executive Partnership & Stakeholder Management
Act as a trusted engineering partner to senior executives, providing clear visibility into risk, quality, delivery, and modernization progress.
Communicate complex technical topics in a concise, executive‑ready manner.
Manage strategic vendor and partner relationships to ensure delivery excellence and innovation.
About You:
You are a hands-on, technical and people leader able to manage directly and through others.
As a technically astute leader, your recognized subject matter expertise allows you regularly dive deep into everything your teams do.
Your leadership style is based on building trust with your team, your peers, and your management.
You are high-energy, detail-oriented, proactive, and adaptive and can work in a dynamic environment.
You possess strong communication skills - both verbal and written – and can get your point across efficiently to a wide range of audiences.
You are obsessed with results, and effectively communicate objectives and how success will be measured to your teams and other stakeholders.
You have strong decision-making skills, and you have a bias for action rather than drawn-out analysis because you understand that most decisions are not irreversible.
You regularly lead retrospection, and continually improve as a result.
You have strong collaborative and organizational skills and you value transparency over avoiding scrutiny.
You understand how to guide a team member’s career including performance evaluation, coaching, and motivation.
You are an experienced manager able to evaluate and coach other managers.
You are experienced in distributed system design and implementation, and have a good understanding of how high-performance, high-reliability, large-scale distributed systems are built and operated.
You have expert level knowledge of software development processes, and you practice Agile at an advanced level.
You have experience and knowledge of Test Driven and Domain Driven Development (TDD / DDD).
You are an experienced user of one or more Application Lifecycle Management tools (e.g., Rally, Jira).
You have good Payments/Card industry knowledge, and you can read and understand a business case.

To find US Salary Ranges, visit People Place. Under the Compensation tab, select "Salary Structures." Within the text of "Salary Structures," click on the link "salary structures 2025," through which you will be able to access the salary ranges for each Mastercard job family. For more information regarding US benefits, visit People Place and review the Benefits tab and the Time Off & Leave tab.