Our PurposeMastercard 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 SummaryVice President, Software Engineering - Send
Who is Mastercard?
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.
Overview
Mastercard Send (part of the Mastercard Move portfolio) enables near real-time money movement across billions of card, bank, and digital accounts globally. Program participants (banks, businesses, and digital players) use Send to modernize domestic and cross-border payments, making funds available to recipients almost instantly. Send supports critical use cases such as disbursements, gig-economy payouts, and person-to-person transfers, accelerating a structural shift toward payment immediacy where timely access to funds can be economically and socially transformative.
Send has achieved strong adoption across banks, fintechs, and digital ecosystems and represents a significant growth engine within Mastercard. The program is on track to generate over $600M in revenue in FY2025 and is expected to grow by 50% over the next three years. For engineering leaders, Send offers the opportunity to build and operate a large-scale, real-time distributed system where reliability, performance, and trust directly translate into measurable business outcomes and meaningful socio-economic impact.
Role
We are seeking a Vice President of Software Engineering to provide strategic, technical, and people leadership for the Send program. This role will lead multiple engineering teams in St. Louis and partner closely with global counterparts across engineering, product, operations, risk, security, and customer teams.
The ideal candidate brings a strong techno-functional background, deep expertise in Java-based distributed systems, and a proven track record of building high-availability, low-latency financial platforms with rigorous operational discipline. This leader will balance hands-on technical depth with executive-level leadership, driving platform modernization, resiliency, scalability, and product innovation while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, security, and regulatory compliance.
Key Responsibilities
Technology & Architecture Leadership
Develop technical vision and execution for the Send engineering organization, aligned to product and platform roadmap.
Lead architecture and design decisions for large-scale Java distributed systems, including event-driven architectures, messaging/streaming platforms, APIs, and data stores.
Drive platform modernization initiatives (e.g., cloud adoption, containerization, service decomposition, resilience patterns, performance optimization).
Establish and enforce engineering standards for code quality, security, scalability, performance, and reliability.
Act as a senior technical authority, is able to dive deep into complex system behaviors, failure modes, and trade-offs when required.
Operational Excellence & Reliability
Champion an SRE-informed operating model with strong focus on availability, latency, throughput, error budgets, and recovery objectives.
Ensure robust incident, problem, and change management practices with measurable improvements in stability and customer impact reduction.
Drive proactive risk identification through FMEA, resiliency testing, chaos engineering, and dependency readiness reviews.
Partner with infrastructure, network, and security teams to ensure end-to-end observability, fault isolation, and predictable performance.
Accountable for meeting and exceeding operational SLAs/SLOs.
Product & Customer Partnership
Work in lockstep with Product Management to translate business strategy into clear, executable engineering roadmaps.
Balance speed of delivery with platform availability, resiliency, regulatory obligations, and long-term maintainability.
Engage directly with strategic customers and partners on technical architecture, onboarding, incident reviews, and roadmap alignment.
Represent engineering perspectives in executive forums, customer briefings, and regulator or partner discussions.
Risk, Security & Compliance
Ensure the platform meets all regulatory, security & compliance requirements (e.g., data protection, auditability, resilience).
Embed secure-by-design and privacy-by-design principles into engineering workflows.
Own engineering inputs into risk assessments, audits, and regulatory engagements.
Drive disciplined handling of production access, change approvals, and related controls.
People Leadership & Talent Development
Build, lead, and retain high-performing engineering leaders and teams in St. Louis.
Create a strong engineering culture grounded in ownership, accountability, learning, and continuous improvement.
Foster diversity of thought, inclusive leadership, and cross-site collaboration.
Coach and develop teams with clear focus on succession planning.
Drive consistent performance management, feedback, and career growth aligned to organizational expectations.
Financial Discipline
Actively manage engineering budget including headcount planning, vendor spend & tooling investments.
Make disciplined recommendatipns & trade-offs between run, change, and transform investments
Ensure transparent reporting of delivery progress, operational health, and financial efficiency to senior leadership.
Support business cases and investment proposals with strong technical and economic rationale.
All About You - What you bring:
Proven experience building and operating real-time payment or money movement platforms, including high throughput, low latency systems at scale.
Deep hands-on background in Java based distributed systems, with a strong grasp of performance, resilience, and scalability trade-offs.
Strong foundation in cloud-native architectures and operating hybrid platforms.
Demonstrated track record of driving delivery while improving platform stability and operational maturity.
Experienced in agile and modern SDLC practices (Scrum/Kanban/Continuous Delivery/DevOps/Quality engineering) and the delivery situations they are used for.
Strong understanding of risk & issue management in regulated environments.
Experience partnering with product, operations, risk, and customer teams in a matrixed environment.
Ability to align engineering investments to business outcomes and customer value.
Experience owning budgets, forecasting spend and optimizing cost structures.
Demonstrated success leading large, multi-team engineering organizations, including globally distributed teams.
Strong executive communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical topics to non-technical audiences.
15+ years of software engineering experience with significant leadership responsibilities.
Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.
Corporate Security ResponsibilityAll 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.
In line with Mastercard's total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in the US, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive base salary and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. The base salary offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including but not limited to location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Mastercard benefits for full time (and certain part time) employees generally include: insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance); flexible spending account and health savings account; paid leaves (including 16 weeks of new parent leave and up to 20 days of bereavement leave); 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time, 25 days of vacation time and 5 personal days, pro-rated based on date of hire; 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays; 401k with a best-in-class company match; deferred compensation for eligible roles; fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities; eligibility for tuition reimbursement; and many more. Mastercard benefits for interns generally include: 56 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time; jury duty leave; and on-site fitness facilities in some locations.
Pay RangesO'Fallon, Missouri: $212,000 - $339,000 USD
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