Director of Software Engineering

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 of Software Engineering
Mastercard is seeking a Director of Software Engineering to lead a team responsible for building and operating the software platforms and APIs that enable secure, scalable access to foundation model capabilities. This role plays a critical part in translating AI innovation into production-grade, enterprise-ready services that can be consumed safely across the business.
You will lead a team of engineers focused on API development, platform services, and system reliability, ensuring that AI capabilities are exposed through robust, high-quality software systems that meet Mastercard's standards for security, performance, and governance.
Role
In this role, you will own the engineering delivery and technical direction of the software engineering team supporting the AI program.
Key responsibilities include:
Lead a team of software engineers responsible for building API platforms and backend services that expose foundation model capabilities (e.g. inference, embeddings, orchestration)
Define and drive best practices for API design, service architecture, and distributed systems development
Ensure platforms are secure by design, implementing authentication, authorization, data protection, and auditability controls
Oversee the development of scalable, reliable, and high-performance services, including traffic management, fault tolerance, and latency optimisation
Partner with AI engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of models into production systems, abstracting complexity for downstream consumers
Manage DevOps and platform teams to ensure strong CI/CD pipelines, deployment patterns, and operational readiness
Drive adoption of observability practices, including monitoring, logging, alerting, and performance tracking
Establish and enforce engineering standards for code quality, testing, documentation, and maintainability
Manage delivery across multiple workstreams, ensuring alignment to program priorities, timelines, and quality expectations
Build and develop a high-performing engineering team, including hiring, coaching, and performance management
Act as a key stakeholder partner, translating business and product requirements into clear technical roadmaps and execution plans
All About You
Proven experience leading teams delivering production software systems at scale, ideally in platform or API-driven environments
Strong background in backend and distributed systems engineering, including API design (REST/gRPC) and service-based architectures
Experience building and operating cloud-native platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including containerisation and orchestration technologies
Solid understanding of security best practices, including authN/authZ, encryption, secrets management, and secure API design
Experience supporting AI/ML or data-driven systems, with familiarity in model integration patterns and production AI usage (preferred)
Strong knowledge of DevOps practices, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and automated deployment pipelines
Experience implementing observability and reliability practices (monitoring, alerting, incident response, SLOs)
Demonstrated ability to lead and scale engineering teams, with a track record of developing senior technical talent
Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to clearly communicate technical concepts and trade-offs
Comfortable operating in fast-moving, evolving environments with ambiguity and shifting priorities
Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in computer science, engineering, or a related field
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.