Vice President, 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
Vice President, Software Engineering
Overview:
Real Time Payments (RTP) program is leading the secular shift in Payments towards real-time account-to-account payments and provides CNI payment services across 6 markets globally.
Role
We are seeking a Vice President of Software Engineering to provide strategic, technical, and people leadership for the RTP program. This role will lead multiple engineering team and partner closely with global counterparts across engineering, product, operations, risk, security, and customer teams.
The ideal candidate brings a strong techno-functional background, deep expertise in Java-based distributed systems, and a proven track record of building high-availability, low-latency financial platforms with rigorous operational discipline. This leader will balance hands-on technical depth with executive-level leadership, driving platform modernization, resiliency, scalability, and product innovation while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, security, and regulatory compliance.
Key Responsibilities
Technology & Architecture Leadership• Develop technical vision and execution for the Send engineering organization, aligned to product and platform roadmap.• Lead architecture and design decisions for large-scale Java distributed systems, including event-driven architectures, messaging/streaming platforms, APIs, and data stores.• Drive platform modernization and technology standardization initiatives• Establish and enforce engineering standards for code quality, security, scalability, performance, and reliability.• Act as a senior technical authority, is able to dive deep into complex system behaviors, failure modes, and trade-offs when required.
Operational Excellence & Reliability• Champion an SRE-informed operating model with strong focus on availability, latency, throughput, error budgets, and recovery objectives.• Ensure robust incident, problem, and change management practices with measurable improvements in stability and customer impact reduction.• Drive proactive risk identification through FMEA, resiliency testing, chaos engineering, and dependency readiness reviews.• Partner with infrastructure, network, and security teams to ensure end-to-end observability, fault isolation, and predictable performance.• Accountable for meeting and exceeding operational SLAs/SLOs.
Product & Customer Partnership• Work in lockstep with Product Management to translate business strategy into clear, executable engineering roadmaps.• Balance speed of delivery with platform availability, resiliency, regulatory obligations, and long-term maintainability.• Engage directly with strategic customers and partners on technical architecture, onboarding, incident reviews, and roadmap alignment.• Represent engineering perspectives in executive forums, customer briefings, and regulator or partner discussions.
Risk, Security & Compliance• Ensure the platform meets all regulatory, security & compliance requirements (e.g., data protection, auditability, resilience).• Embed secure-by-design and privacy-by-design principles into engineering workflows.• Own engineering inputs into risk assessments, audits, and regulatory engagements.• Drive disciplined handling of production access, change approvals, and related controls.
People Leadership & Talent Development• Build, lead, and retain high-performing engineering leaders and teams in St. Louis.• Create a strong engineering culture grounded in ownership, accountability, learning, and continuous improvement.• Foster diversity of thought, inclusive leadership, and cross-site collaboration.• Coach and develop teams with clear focus on succession planning.• Drive consistent performance management, feedback, and career growth aligned to organizational expectations.
Financial Discipline• Actively manage engineering budget including headcount planning, vendor spend & tooling investments.• Make disciplined recommendations & trade-offs between run, change, and transform investments• Ensure transparent reporting of delivery progress, operational health, and financial efficiency to senior leadership.• Support business cases and investment proposals with strong technical and economic rationale.
All About You - What you bring:
• Proven experience building and operating real-time payment or money movement platforms, including high throughput, low latency systems at scale.• Deep hands-on background in Java based distributed systems, with a strong grasp of performance, resilience, and scalability trade-offs.• Strong foundation in cloud-native architectures and operating hybrid platforms.• Demonstrated track record of driving delivery while improving platform stability and operational maturity.• Experienced in agile and modern SDLC practices (Scrum/Kanban/Continuous Delivery/DevOps/Quality engineering) and the delivery situations they are used for.• Strong understanding of risk & issue management in regulated environments.• Experience partnering with product, operations, risk, and customer teams in a matrixed environment.• Ability to align engineering investments to business outcomes and customer value.• Experience owning budgets, forecasting spend and optimizing cost structures.• Demonstrated success leading large, multi-team engineering organizations, including globally distributed teams.• Strong executive communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical topics to non-technical audiences.• 18+ years of software engineering experience with significant leadership responsibilities.
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.