Director, 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 Director, Software Engineering Overview The CNPF Data & AI organization is looking for a "Director, Software Engineering” to drive hands on delivery of applied AI and agentic capabilities, building the Mastercard Virtual C-Suite products. You will lead by example through deep hands-on engineering, influence technical direction, and partner closely with Applied AI, Data Science, and Product teams to take agentic solutions from experimentation to secure, scalable production. The Director, Software Engineering is responsible for defining and delivering the engineering strategy for next-generation agentic applications, reusable agent frameworks, and enterprise AI enablement capabilities. This leader will build and scale software platforms where agents operate as intelligent personas, embedded product capabilities, and orchestrated digital workers that solve meaningful customer and enterprise problems. The role requires a strong engineering leader who can translate emerging AI and agentic concepts into secure, reliable, observable, and production-grade systems, while also accelerating AI tooling adoption and modern engineering practices across the organization. We Relentlessly Care About the What and About the How • You make sound decisions with incomplete information, take ownership of outcomes, and adapt as circumstances evolve: Comfort with ambiguity • The standards are high and the scope is broad. You pursue depth with genuine intellectual curiosity and apply rigorous judgment about where that depth is most needed: Curiosity and prioritization • You invest in your teammates. You share what you learn. You measure your contribution by the strength of the team, not only by individual performance: Giver's mindset • You understand that the strength of this team is inseparable from the diversity of thought, background, and experience each member brings. You contribute to a culture where different perspectives are actively sought, and where collective resilience matters as much as individual excellence: Cultural fit and team spirit Key Responsibilities • Define and lead the engineering vision for agentic applications, agent frameworks, and reusable AI platform capabilities that can be adopted across multiple products and teams. • Build and scale engineering teams that create agents as product capabilities, agent personas for targeted workflows, and orchestration layers that support multi-step reasoning, tool use, and action execution. • Drive the architecture and delivery of production-grade agentic systems, including context management, memory, tool integration, workflow orchestration, observability, evaluation, and safety guardrails. • Establish a common agentic engineering framework that standardizes how teams design, build, test, deploy, monitor, and improve intelligent agents at enterprise scale. • Partner with Product, Data Science, Security, Risk, and Platform teams to identify high-value use cases and translate them into scalable software solutions. • Lead the adoption of AI-assisted engineering and developer tooling that improves productivity, code quality, speed of experimentation, and software delivery outcomes. • Shape platform capabilities for agent lifecycle management, prompt and instruction management, model access, retrieval integration, policy enforcement, telemetry, and feedback loops. • Drive engineering excellence across architecture, coding standards, testing,