Vice President, Software Engineering - DMP

Vice President, Software Engineering - DMP

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.