Vice President, Platform Architecture

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, Platform Architecture

Overview
The Applied AI, Data & UX organization accelerates AI innovation and product delivery across Commercial & New Payment Flows (CNPF) through three pillars:

This portfolio includes the Commercial Data Fabric, Agentic Development Frameworks, Unified UX Framework, Virtual C-Suite products, Commercial Business Directory, and other strategic AI capabilities.

Role

The Vice President, Enterprise Architecture will define and govern the long-term architectural vision across the organization's portfolio of AI, data, UX, and platform products. This leader will ensure solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, and composable while aligning technology investments with business strategy.

The role serves as the senior architectural authority across the portfolio, driving enterprise-wide technical standards, influencing strategic decisions, and ensuring platforms work together as an integrated ecosystem rather than independent solutions.

The ideal candidate is a systems thinker who can seamlessly engage with executives, architects, product leaders, and engineers to translate strategic objectives into clear technical direction and drive architectural excellence across a complex global organization.

Key Responsibilities
Architecture Strategy & Governance
Define and own the long-term architecture strategy across AI, data, UX, and platform products.
Lead the architecture review process and establish standards for system design, integration, scalability, resiliency, and security.
Govern key architecture artifacts including technical standards, architecture decision records (ADRs), and integration patterns.
Identify and mitigate enterprise-level technology risks before they impact delivery.
AI, Data & Platform Architecture
Provide architectural oversight for the Commercial Data Fabric, including data pipelines, governance, feature platforms, analytics, and AI workloads.
Define architecture for agentic platforms, multi-agent orchestration, memory and context management, AI guardrails, evaluation frameworks, and observability.
Ensure AI products leverage common platforms and reusable services to prevent fragmentation and technical debt.
Guide architectural decisions across the full AI lifecycle, including data ingestion, training, deployment, monitoring, and optimization.
Engineering Excellence & Security
Establish standards for APIs, service boundaries, deployment architectures, data contracts, and AI evaluation frameworks.
Embed security, compliance, auditability, privacy, and regulatory requirements into architectural patterns from inception.
Drive adoption of security-by-design and resilience engineering practices.
Ensure adherence to PII, PCI, and governance requirements across global platforms.
Executive Leadership & Strategic Advisory
Serve as trusted advisor to senior executives on architecture strategy, technology investments, vendor selection, and build-versus-buy decisions.
Develop multi-year architecture roadmaps aligned to business priorities and Mastercard enterprise standards.
Translate complex technical trade-offs into clear business recommendations for executive stakeholders.
Represent the organization in architecture governance forums and external industry engagements.
Talent & Organizational Leadership
Mentor and develop principal architects and senior engineering leaders.
Foster a culture of architectural excellence, innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning.
Promote architecture as an enabling capability that accelerates product delivery and business outcomes.
Required Technical Expertise
AI/ML Architecture
Enterprise-scale ML platforms, feature stores, model training infrastructure, deployment pipelines, monitoring, and evaluation frameworks.
Production experience in AI/ML systems with a strong understanding of scalability, reliability, and model governance.
Data Platforms
Modern lakehouse architectures, data governance frameworks, batch and streaming processing, data contracts, and multi-region data management.
Expertise in technologies such as Spark, Airflow, Delta Lake, DLT, and related ecosystems.
Agentic & AI Infrastructure
Multi-agent orchestration, context and memory management, policy enforcement, MCP integration, AI guardrails, evaluation pipelines, and observability.
Strong understanding of enterprise AI platform architecture and operational governance.
Distributed Systems & Cloud Architecture
Cloud-native platforms, microservices, event-driven systems, Kubernetes, service meshes, APIs, and resilience engineering.
Experience designing high-scale, mission-critical distributed systems in regulated environments.
Security & Compliance
Security-by-design principles, identity and access management, threat modeling, audit controls, PCI DSS, PII governance, and regulatory compliance frameworks.
UX Platform Architecture
Design systems, component libraries, design tokens, micro-frontends, experience telemetry, and scalable UX platform patterns.
Leadership Competencies
Systems Thinking: Evaluates decisions based on enterprise-wide impact and long-term sustainability.
Technical Credibility: Influences through deep expertise and sound architectural judgment.
Executive Communication: Translates technical complexity into business outcomes and risk-based decisions.
Strategic Foresight: Anticipates risks and opportunities before they emerge.
Collaborative Leadership: Drives alignment across product, engineering, architecture, and business teams.
Inclusive Leadership: Encourages diverse perspectives and develops technical talent globally.
Qualifications
Required
15+ years of software engineering experience with 8+ years in enterprise, platform, or systems architecture roles.
5+ years of senior technology leadership experience managing architects and engineering leaders within global, matrixed organizations.
Proven track record developing and executing architecture strategies across complex, multi-platform environments.
Deep expertise in AI/ML engineering, data platforms, distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, and enterprise governance.
Experience within financial services, payments, fintech, or other highly regulated industries.
Demonstrated success influencing executive stakeholders and driving decisions through technical leadership rather than formal authority.
Experience leading strategic platform evaluations, vendor assessments, and build-versus-buy decisions.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Preferred
Experience building large-scale AI products, commercial data platforms, or agentic AI systems.
Knowledge of payments technology ecosystems and enterprise-scale platform architectures.
Expertise in AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, and multi-region deployments.
Experience establishing or leading Architecture Review Board functions.
Industry thought leadership through publications, conference speaking, standards participation, or open-source contributions.
Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or MBA.

This role is responsible for ensuring architectural coherence, technical excellence, and long-term scalability across Mastercard's Applied AI, Data & UX portfolio, enabling the rapid delivery of secure, world-class AI and data products at global scale.

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 [email protected] 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

New York City, New York: $254,000 - $407,000 USD