Vice President of Platform Architecture, Mastercard
$254-407k
Global payments technology company
Be an early applicant
Global payments technology company
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$254-407k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible.
Role
Who you are
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
Mastercard is in the global payments business, and operates the world's fastest payments processing network. Its products and solutions have become central to everyday commerce across the world, in activities ranging from shopping and travelling to running businesses.
As the economy has become more and more digitized, Mastercard has been a leading player in helping businesses and individuals across the globe embrace card payments and digital banking. One of the world's largest companies, its revenue has seen consistent gain in the last 20 years.
The challenge for modern payments companies is that payments are always changing, as seen in the astronomical rise of contactless payments over the last decade. Mastercard's acquisition of blockchain systems, and an overall focus on leveraging its technology towards a digital economy, has placed the company in good stead to keep up to date with current trends, like cryptocurrency, in the digitized payments world.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
21% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Purchase, Harrison, NY
Leadership
Michael Miebach
(CEO)Michael has served in a variety of roles at the company, including President and CPO. They are currently a Board Member at IBM, Accion, the World Resources Institute, the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, and the Metropolitan Opera. They are also a Trustee of USCIB.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 186 more jobs at Mastercard