Director – Platform Engineering at Mastercard

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 – Platform Engineering

• Job Title
• Director – Platform Engineering
  Reporting to: Vice President, Big Data Analytics & Engineering
  Location: Pune

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About the Role:

The Director – Platform Engineering is the senior engineering leader accountable for the end to end development, scalability, and operational excellence of the Value Quantification Platform.
This role owns platform strategy and execution across web applications, data engineering, analytics, and reporting layers, ensuring reliable delivery, strong product onboarding, and seamless collaboration across Mastercard’s technology ecosystem.
You will lead a multi disciplinary team, work closely with Product and cross functional partners, and act as the single engineering owner for platform outcomes-balancing innovation, scale, security, and compliance.

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Key Responsibilities:

• Platform & Engineering Ownership
• Own the architecture, engineering strategy, delivery, and maintenance of the MVQ platform across web, data, and analytics domains.
• Ensure the platform evolves to enterprise grade, globally scalable solutions.
• Maintain high standards of availability, performance, security, reliability, and maintainability.
• People & Organisation Leadership
• Lead, mentor, and develop Lead Engineers and Senior Engineers, fostering technical excellence and strong ownership culture.
• Act as a strong people manager—driving performance, career growth, succession planning, and team engagement.
• Build a collaborative, inclusive, and high trust engineering culture aligned with Mastercard’s DQ values.
• Delivery & Product Onboarding Management
• Maintain close oversight of platform development, release cadence, stability, and technical debt.
• Ensure smooth and timely product onboarding, supporting both internal and external use cases.
• Balance new feature delivery with platform resilience and operational excellence.
• Cross Functional & Stakeholder Leadership
• Partner closely with Product, Data Science, Cyber & Security, Architecture, Cloud, and Infrastructure teams.
• Serve as the primary engineering point of contact for VQ platform stakeholders.
• Communicate clearly with senior leadership through well structured presentations, updates, and decision papers.
• Enterprise Architecture, Security & Governance
• Navigate Mastercard’s security, technology, architecture, and data governance frameworks to ensure compliant delivery.
• Guide teams through design reviews, security approvals, data controls, and enterprise standards adoption.
• Ensure privacy, access control, and regulatory requirements are embedded by design.

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Technical Skills & Expertise:

While this is a director role, deep technical credibility and prior hands on experience are essential.

• Web & Application Platform Expertise
• Strong understanding of modern full stack web architectures including:
  o Frontend: React, Next.js, Redux, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS
  o Backend: Java (Spring Boot), Python (Django, Django REST Framework)
• Expertise in RESTful API design, API versioning, integration, and security.
• Experience designing high performance, scalable, and accessible web platforms, aligned with WCAG 2.1 standards.
• Knowledge of application performance optimisation, security best practices, and observability.
• Data Engineering & Analytics Platforms
• Deep experience with big data and analytics platforms, including:
  o Hadoop ecosystem, Py Spark, Impala
  o SQL across relational and distributed data stores
• Strong background in data ingestion, transformation, unification, and pipeline design.
• Hands on experience with ETL / ELT tools such as Airflow, Apache Ni Fi, Azure Data Factory, Pentaho, or Talend.
• Experience designing analytics, reporting, and value measurement platforms with reliable, trusted data foundations.
• Exposure to machine learning concepts and advanced analytics use cases.
• Experience with Graph Databases is a plus.
• Cloud, Dev

Ops & Platform Operations:

• Strong understanding of cloud native architectures on Azure and/or AWS.
• Experience with containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices for both application and data platforms.
• Experience implementing logging, metrics, tracing, monitoring, and alerting for production systems.

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• Stakeholder, Communication & Influence Skills
• Excellent stakeholder management skills across product, technology, security, and business teams.
• Strong presentation and storytelling ability, capable of explaining complex technical concepts to executive audiences.
• Ability to influence decisions across teams without direct authority.

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• Experience & Qualifications
• 12+ years of experience in engineering, data platforms, or analytics led systems.
• Prior experience in a senior technical leadership role (Director, Senior Manager, Principal Engineer with org ownership).
• Proven track record of building and scaling enterprise grade platforms.
• Experience in payments, financial services, or other regulated environments preferred.

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• Ways of Working
• Hands on mindset with strategic perspective.
• Comfortable operating at both architecture level and execution level discussions.
• Strong bias for outcomes, quality, and long term platform sustainability.
• Role model of Mastercard’s Decency Quotient (DQ) values.

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.