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.

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.

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.