Vice President, Platform 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

Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential.

Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.

This is an exciting opportunity to support Mastercard Multi Centre Strategy, in support of a Mastercard business, which provides Critical National Infrastructure to the UK.

The Mastercard UK company that enables the payments of 90% of salaries, 70% of utility bills, most ATM transactions and every cheque cleared in the UK.

We provide services to over 60 million citizens, and the UK private, public and third sectors.

In 2024, we processed 14 billion transactions, with a value of more than £10 trillion.

The Mastercard UK companies products include Bacs Direct Credits, Bacs Direct Debits, Faster Payments, the LINK ATM network for cash withdrawals, and the Image Clearing Service (ICS) that supports cheque clearing.

Overview

This is an exciting opportunity to join Mastercard as a Pune Site and Technology Leader. This new role has dual responsibilities: acting as the single leadership point of contact for all Pune-based Mastercard colleagues and providing overall Technology leadership for the Pune team.

The ideal candidate is an experienced and credible leader who can build strong relationships, provide clear direction in a dynamic environment, and bring the strategic perspective needed to support Mastercard colleagues and technology priorities.

Role

This role involves supporting and coordinating multiple technology deliveries to ensure alignment with organizational goals and objectives. Responsibilities include managing timelines, budgets, and resources while collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive successful outcomes via Agile frameworks and methodologies. The position requires strong analytical and problem-solving skills to identify risks and implement effective solutions.

The main purpose of this role is:

• Act as the local leadership and escalation point for Mastercard colleagues based in Pune, ensuring clear accountability, appropriate empowerment and effective connection with UK People Leaders.
• Build strong working relationships with Pune-based senior leaders, support functions, partners and vendors to enable effective local delivery and collaboration.
• Communicate Mastercard’s and Vocalink’s strategic vision for future-state business and technology architecture, ensuring stakeholders understand key design and operating model developments.
• Strengthen employee engagement by ensuring Pune-based colleagues are included in local activities, have an appropriate voice, and can raise common barriers to execution.
• Facilitate a collective country’s view on key issues, taking action where appropriate and escalating matters that require broader leadership support.
• Support hiring, retention and colleague experience for Pune-based teams, working in partnership with relevant People Leaders and support functions.
• Oversee the promotion of future-oriented platform technology initiatives and business processes that support innovation and Mastercard’s business strategy.
• Drive improvement initiatives across design and implementation, identifying opportunities for automation, simplification and reduced time to deployment.
• Partner with security, A&T, database and platform teams to ensure architectural standards, operational resilience and appropriate safeguards are maintained.
• Serve as a Technology leader, leading the broader technical community to develop innovations and technological advancements.

All About You

The ideal candidate for this position should:

• Demonstrate senior leadership experience in a complex, multi-national technology or payments environment, ideally with exposure to critical national infrastructure, complex customers and regulators.
• Strong strategic thinking, with the ability to set direction, communicate priorities clearly and translate business and technology objectives into actionable plans.
• Experience leading teams working in Agile methodologies, including SAFe Agile frameworks, with the ability to lead technology delivery through iterative planning, cross-functional collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills, with the confidence to engage effectively across senior executives, technical teams, support functions, partners, vendors and regulators.
• Proven ability to lead, motivate and develop diverse matrix teams directly and indirectly, creating clarity, accountability and an inclusive culture across locations.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to present to senior leadership level and explain complex technical, operational and change impacts clearly and concisely.
• Commercially aware and financially disciplined, with experience managing resources, budgets and priorities across multiple functional areas or complex programmes.
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making capability, using analysis and judgement to identify risks, resolve barriers and drive effective outcomes.
• Commitment to customer focus, operational excellence, continuous improvement and innovation, including opportunities for simplification, automation and more efficient delivery.

• High personal integrity, strong professional ethics and a leadership style that embodies Vocalink and Mastercard values.

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices;

• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;

• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and

• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.