Director Data Engineering
Mastercard · Posted Nov 5
Global technology company connecting consumers, financial institutions, merchants, and businesses through secure payment processing and digital commerce solutions
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About the role
The Data Collection & Engineering (DC&E) organisation at Mastercard builds and operates the enterprise data ecosystem behind a connected digital payments economy, handling massive volumes of transaction, customer, merchant, fraud, and operational data. The team works across large-scale Data Warehouse, Data Lakehouse, and cloud-native data platforms supporting analytics, AI, product innovation, and regulatory reporting. This Director role sets the data engineering strategy and platform architecture, leads large cloud modernisation programmes, and manages engineering managers, architects, and distributed engineering teams.
What you will do
- Define and execute the long-term Data Engineering strategy aligned with Mastercard's AI, analytics, digital payments, and data platform roadmap.
- Partner with business, product, architecture, security, and technology leaders to translate strategic objectives into scalable data solutions.
- Drive organisational transformation initiatives involving cloud migration, platform modernisation, automation, and engineering excellence.
- Develop multi-year roadmaps for data platform evolution, capacity growth, and technology investment planning.
- Lead the architecture and implementation of highly scalable, secure, and resilient Data Lakehouse and Data Warehouse platforms.
- Establish enterprise standards for data ingestion, transformation, storage, governance, lineage, metadata management, observability, and quality control.
- Drive adoption of reusable engineering frameworks and platform capabilities that enable self-service data products and accelerated delivery.
- Ensure architecture supports a "Build Once, Deploy Anywhere" model across on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud environments.
- Lead large-scale migration programmes moving enterprise data workloads from legacy platforms to cloud-native architectures.
- Establish best practices for distributed processing, workflow orchestration, platform automation, and infrastructure optimisation.
- Drive adoption of modern DataOps, DevOps, CI/CD, and Infrastructure-as-Code practices across the engineering organisation.
- Establish operational standards for platform resiliency, disaster recovery, performance engineering, and capacity management.
- Build, lead, and develop high-performing teams comprising Managers, Principal Engineers, Lead Engineers, and Senior Data Engineers.
- Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning.
- Drive workforce planning, succession management, talent acquisition, skills development, and employee engagement initiatives.
- Provide coaching and mentorship to technology leaders and senior engineering talent.
- Oversee delivery of multiple strategic programmes supporting Mastercard's analytics, data science, product development, fraud, and regulatory functions.
- Manage complex stakeholder relationships across business units, executive leadership teams, and external partners.
- Ensure project execution aligns with business priorities, timeline commitments, financial objectives, and risk management standards.
- Establish governance frameworks and operating models that improve delivery predictability and engineering productivity.
- Evaluate emerging technologies and define Mastercard's point of view on modern data engineering, AI-enabled data platforms, real-time analytics, and next-generation lakehouse architectures.
- Sponsor proof-of-concept initiatives and technology evaluations that drive competitive advantage and business value.
- Champion adoption of GenAI-enabled engineering practices, metadata-driven frameworks, and intelligent automation.
- Establish engineering KPIs, SLAs, and platform health metrics to continuously improve service reliability and operational efficiency.
- Lead resolution of high-severity production incidents and implement systemic improvements to prevent recurrence.
- Ensure compliance with Mastercard's security, privacy, regulatory, and engineering governance standards.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- 15+ years of experience delivering enterprise-scale Data Warehouse, Data Lake, Lakehouse, and Big Data solutions.
- 7+ years of leadership experience managing engineering managers, architects, and distributed engineering teams.
- Proven success leading global engineering organisations across multiple business domains and technology platforms.
- Experience managing large programmes involving multiple teams, stakeholders, vendors, and strategic initiatives.
- Deep expertise designing and implementing large-scale data platforms using: Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Scala/Java/Python, Hadoop ecosystem technologies and Distributed storage and compute architectures
- Extensive experience building: Enterprise Data Warehouses, Data Lakes, Lakehouse platforms, Real-time and batch processing frameworks, Enterprise metadata and governance platforms
- Strong understanding of: Data Modelling, Data Governance, Data Quality Management, Data Cataloguing, Data Lineage, Data Security and Master Data Management (MDM)
- Extensive experience designing cloud-native architectures on AWS and hybrid cloud environments.
- Strong experience with: Amazon S3, EMR, Glue, Athena, EKS, Airflow, NiFi, Streaming and event-driven architectures
- Experience implementing: CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, DataOps frameworks, Platform observability and monitoring solutions
- Strong expertise with Relational and NoSQL technologies: Oracle, SQL Server, Cassandra and other Distributed databases
- Advanced SQL optimisation and performance tuning skills.
- Ability to connect technology investments with measurable business outcomes.
- Strong executive communication and presentation skills.
- Experience influencing Vice Presidents, Senior Vice Presidents, and executive stakeholders.
- Proven ability to balance innovation, delivery commitments, operational excellence, and financial accountability.
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
About Mastercard
Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry that connects consumers, financial institutions, merchants, governments, and businesses worldwide. It operates a fast and secure payment processing network that spans more than 200 countries and territories. Through innovative products and solutions in credit, debit, digital assets, and security, Mastercard makes commerce safer, simpler, and more accessible.
- Industry
- Payments
- Company size
- 10001+ employees
- Founded
- 1966
- Location
- Purchase, New York, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Funding
Public Company · $115M raised
Leadership
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Business Officer
President & Chief Technology Officer
Chief People Officer
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