Director, AI Center of Excellence

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
Director, AI Center of Excellence
As a Technical Director within the AI Center of Excellence based in Singapore, you will define and drive the technical product strategy for AI capabilities while shaping scalable, real-world solution architectures for deployment across China's diverse ecosystem.
You will bridge global AI innovation with local delivery owning the evolution of AI tooling and platforms while ensuring they translate into deployable, production-ready solutions across client, partner, and public-sector environments.
This role combines deep technical product ownership with hands-on solution design ensuring AI systems are not only innovative, but practical, trusted, and scalable within China's regulatory, infrastructure, and operational realities.
Role
This is a dual-hat role combining technical product ownership and solution architecture leadership.
As the technical product manager, you define the roadmap, requirements, and adoption strategy for AI capabilities, ensuring tools are usable, scalable, and aligned to real business and ecosystem needs.
As the solution architect, you work early with internal teams, clients, and ecosystem partners to design end-to-end AI architectures that can be deployed across varied environments (cloud, on-prem, hybrid, sovereign), embedding trust, resilience, and operational readiness by design.
You lead through influence aligning engineering, data science, product, governance, and external stakeholders driving clarity and decisions in complex, ambiguous environments.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Product Management (AI Capabilities & Platforms)• Define and own the technical product strategy, roadmap, and lifecycle for AI and data capabilities within the AI CoE specifically for China.• Translate business and client needs into clear technical requirements (epics, user stories, acceptance criteria) that drive delivery.• Partner with global teams to adapt and localise AI tooling, platforms, and frameworks for China-specific use cases and constraints.• Ensure releases are adoption ready, balancing usability, scalability, performance, and trust requirements.• Track product outcomes (adoption, performance, business impact), identify gaps, and continuously refine the roadmap.
Solution Architecture & Ecosystem Engagement (AI Deployment & Scaling)• Design and deliver end-to-end AI solutions with clients, partners, and ecosystem stakeholders, aligned to real-world deployment environments and infrastructure constraints (cloud, on-prem, hybrid, sovereign).• Define scalable AI architectures across data pipelines, models/LLMs, orchestration, APIs, and monitoring, embedding trust, operational readiness, and lifecycle management by design.• Develop reusable reference architectures, patterns, and playbooks to accelerate delivery and ensure consistency and scalability across implementations.• Provide architectural guidance and design authority to delivery teams, ensuring high-quality, repeatable deployment outcomes.• Act as a technical advisor in strategic engagement developing high-impact use cases and bridging business needs, technical feasibility, and deployment realities.• Strengthen Mastercard's position as a trusted AI partner through ecosystem collaboration and delivery of scalable, real-world solutions in China.
Stakeholder Alignment & Decision Leadership• Align diverse stakeholders (engineering, business, governance, legal, compliance, partners) and drive decisions in complex environments.• Navigate tradeoffs across scalability, performance, explainability, risk, and operational burden.• Translate between technical and non technical audiences-ensuring clarity, alignment, and momentum.• Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership on AI architecture, product direction, and deployment strategy.
All About You
Must have• Strong academic background in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent experience.• Proven experience building and deploying AI/data solutions in production, including lifecycle management post-deployment.• Experience owning technical products or platforms, from concept through adoption and scaling.• Strong experience designing and delivering complex, real-world AI architectures across diverse environments.• Demonstrated ability to work directly with external stakeholders (clients, partners, system integrators, public sector).• Ability to drive decisions and outcomes without direct authority in matrixed, cross-regional environments.• Given the focus of this role to China, you will need excellent executive communication skills in both English & Mandarin, with the ability to translate technical concepts into clear business value narratives.
Technical skills• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and modern ML platforms (e.g., Azure ML, Databricks, SageMaker).• Understanding of AI/ML frameworks, data engineering, APIs, and distributed system architectures.• Familiarity with GenAI / LLM architecture, orchestration frameworks, and model lifecycle tooling.• Experience with cloud and hybrid deployment models; familiarity with sovereign or restricted deployment environments is a plus.
Preferred• Experience working in or with the China market, including understanding of local ecosystem and deployment constraints.• Exposure to AI governance, Responsible AI, or trust frameworks.• Experience in co innovation or joint delivery with clients and partners.• Contributions to centres of excellence or regional capability building initiatives.
Success Measures• Successful deployment of scalable AI solutions across client and partner environments.• Strong pipeline of high impact AI use cases co developed with clients and ecosystem partners.• High confidence from leadership and stakeholders in technical direction, product strategy, and delivery execution.
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.