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
• DMP

Overview:

Mastercard is seeking a Vice President, Software Engineering to lead the Authorization Decisioning domain within the Decision Management program. This role is accountable for advancing a portfolio of market-facing products by leading and scaling high-performing teams of Software Engineers, Product Managers, and Program Managers.
As a senior technology leader, you will operate at the intersection of engineering excellence, product innovation, and cross-functional collaboration. Success in this role requires strong organizational influence, the ability to navigate complex stakeholder landscapes, and a deep sense of empathy for customer and partner needs.
Decision Management enables faster, smarter decisioning at global scale by structuring and applying complex business logic across the payment journey and beyond. Authorization Decisioning orchestrates high throughput, low latency, and data-intensive processing across Decision Management’s intelligent system on behalf of a suite of market-facing products.
This is a hybrid position based in O’Fallon, MO, requiring three days per week onsite.

Role:

• Define and drive the engineering vision and strategy for Authorization and Authentication Decisioning.
• Lead the delivery of complex, cross-functional initiatives spanning real-time decisioning, rules engines, AI/ML inference, data pipelines, and platform services.
• Establish and scale engineering best practices, standards, and frameworks across teams.
• Ensure platform reliability, performance, scalability, security, and compliance in line with the demands of global, mission-critical systems.
• Own operational excellence, including SLAs, observability, and incident management.
• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing organization of engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
• Set clear goals, performance expectations, and career development plans aligned with Mastercard leadership principles.
• Act as a multiplier by scaling impact through leaders, systems, and culture.
• Balance near-term delivery commitments with long-term platform evolution and modernization.
• Champion strong engineering judgment, operational discipline, and customer-centric thinking.
• Model Mastercard leadership behaviors, fostering a culture of inclusion, ownership, and continuous improvement.

All About You:

• Proven experience as a Director or Vice President of Software Engineering, Architecture, or a comparable senior leadership role.
• Demonstrated success leading distributed, global engineering organizations.
• Deep expertise in modern application architectures, including APIs, microservices, event-driven systems, batch processing, and data platforms.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of technologies such as Java, REST APIs, Kafka, messaging systems (MQ), Spring, CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins), and cloud platforms (e.g., Pivotal Cloud Foundry or similar).
• Proven track record of delivering high-scale, low-latency, highly available platforms in regulated or mission-critical environments.
• Experience leading large, complex programs with predictable, on-time, and on-budget delivery.
• Strong understanding of SDLC methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) and when to apply them effectively.
• Expertise in building and operating resilient systems with a focus on security, reliability, testing, observability, and service-oriented design.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to influence executive, business, and technical stakeholders.
• Strong analytical thinking and decision-making capabilities in ambiguous and complex environments.
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.

Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact reasonable_accommodation@mastercard.com and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.

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.

In line with Mastercard’s total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in the US, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive base salary and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. The base salary offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including but not limited to location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Mastercard benefits for full time (and certain part time) employees generally include: insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance); flexible spending account and health savings account; paid leaves (including 16 weeks of new parent leave and up to 20 days of bereavement leave); 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time, 25 days of vacation time and 5 personal days, pro-rated based on date of hire; 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays; 401k with a best-in-class company match; deferred compensation for eligible roles; fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities; eligibility for tuition reimbursement; and many more. Mastercard benefits for interns generally include: 56 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time; jury duty leave; and on-site fitness facilities in some locations.

Pay Ranges

O'Fallon, Missouri: $212,000 - $339,000 USD