Director of Software Engineering

About the role

Mastercard is looking for a Director of Software Engineering to lead a team that builds and operates software platforms and APIs delivering secure, scalable access to foundation model capabilities. The role bridges AI innovation and production‑grade services, ensuring robust, high‑quality systems that meet Mastercard’s security, performance and governance standards.

Key responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers developing API platforms and backend services for foundation model capabilities such as inference, embeddings and orchestration.
• Define and enforce best practices for API design, service architecture and distributed systems development.
• Ensure platforms are secure by design, implementing authentication, authorization, data protection and auditability controls.
• Oversee the creation of scalable, reliable, high‑performance services, managing traffic, fault tolerance and latency optimisation.
• Partner with AI engineering teams to integrate models into production, abstracting complexity for downstream consumers.
• Manage DevOps and platform teams to maintain robust CI/CD pipelines, deployment patterns and operational readiness.
• Drive observability practices including monitoring, logging, alerting and performance tracking.
• Establish engineering standards for code quality, testing, documentation and maintainability.
• Coordinate delivery across multiple workstreams, aligning with program priorities, timelines and quality expectations.
• Build and develop a high‑performing engineering team through hiring, coaching and performance management.
• Translate business and product requirements into clear technical roadmaps and execution plans.

Required profile

• Proven experience leading teams delivering production software systems at scale, preferably in platform or API‑driven environments.
• Strong background in backend and distributed systems engineering.
• Demonstrated ability to ensure security, performance and governance in large‑scale services.
• Experience collaborating with AI and DevOps teams to bring models into production.

Required skills

• API development and design
• Backend engineering
• Distributed systems
• Authentication and authorization
• Data protection and auditability
• CI/CD pipeline management
• Observability (monitoring, logging, alerting)
• Performance optimisation and latency management