Director, Platform Engineering

Director, Platform Engineering

Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships, and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.

Role Summary

At Mastercard, the pace of change across technology, AI, and the nature of work requires that we constantly push the boundaries for the technologies in building and operating infrastructure and applications globally. The Director, Platform Engineering is a critical technology and engineering leadership role within Operations Automation Program accountable for advancing our infrastructure and platform automation strategy through innovation and effective problem-solving. This role focuses on analyzing, coding, and delivering software and platform solutions. Operations Automation program supports Mastercard's global infrastructure footprint by building and maintaining automation platforms, automating infrastructure, services, and application delivery with efficient tools and processes.

The Director, Platform Engineering is a hands-on technical expert responsible for designing, building, and maintaining automation frameworks, platform services, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) capabilities that power large scale, hybrid infrastructure environments. Focuses on engineering reusable automation patterns, enabling self-service infrastructure delivery, and improving reliability, consistency, and velocity across cloud and on prem platforms. The ideal candidate brings hands on experience with infrastructure automation tools like Terraform, Ansible or Chef, strong DevOps engineering skills, and a passion for building scalable automation solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain Infrastructure as Code solutions using platforms like Terraform, Ansible, Chef to automate provisioning across cloud and on prem environments.
• Develop reusable modules, playbooks, and automation libraries that standardize infrastructure deployment patterns.
• Engineer and enhance platform services, including CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, artifact repositories, and configuration management systems.
• Implement automated testing, validation, and security scanning for IaC and platform components.
• Integrate automation with cloud platforms, virtualization systems, network/security appliances, and enterprise tooling.
• Implement drift detection, compliance checks, and automated remediation workflows.
• Collaborate with cloud, network, security, and SRE teams to define automation standards and best practices.
• Troubleshoot complex infrastructure, automation, and CI/CD issues across hybrid environments.
• Contribute to documentation, architectural diagrams, and engineering design reviews.

Required Qualifications

• 58+ years of experience in DevOps, platform engineering, cloud engineering, or infrastructure automation roles.
• Strong hands-on experience with Terraform, Ansible or Chef
• Solid understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and on prem infrastructure (VMware, Linux, networking fundamentals).
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, or Azure DevOps.
• Strong scripting or programming skills (Python, Go, or similar).
• Experience with configuration management, secrets management, and artifact repositories.
• Familiarity with GitOps workflows and declarative infrastructure patterns.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across infrastructure, automation, and platform layers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience developing or extending Terraform modules or custom providers.
• Experience with Ansible Collections, dynamic inventories, or Ansible Tower/Ansible Automation Platform.
• Experience with policy as code tools (OPA and Sentinel).
• Experience with monitoring, observability, and logging platforms.
• Exposure to SRE practices and reliability engineering.

Core Technical Skills (Competency Areas)

• Infrastructure as Code
• Terraform (modules, workspaces, state management)
• Ansible (playbooks, roles, collections, automation controller)
• VMware, Linux, virtualization, hybrid networking
• DevOps & CI/CD
• Pipeline design and automation
• Python, Go, or PowerShell
• Self-service automation
• Configuration management
• Observability and operational tooling

Role Scope & Collaboration

• Works within a platform engineering or DevOps organization to build automation capabilities used across the enterprise.
• Collaborates closely with:
• Cloud engineering
• Network and security teams
• SRE and operations
• Application development teams
• Architecture and governance groups
• Acts as a subject matter expert for IaC, automation patterns, and DevOps tooling.
• Contributes to engineering standards, reusable patterns, and platform roadmaps.