Director, Software Engineering

Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. The Director of Software Engineering will lead Quality Engineering as a strategic function across all CNPF products and platforms, building and managing a global team focused on customer experience and product reliability.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and execute short-term and medium-term strategic plans for Quality Engineering
• Lead the design and delivery of complex testing solutions across full-stack applications, data systems, and infrastructure
• Drive test automation strategy — define what to automate, at what layer, with what tooling
• Embed quality earlier in the lifecycle (shift-left) and extend into production (shift-right)
• Define QE strategy for data products — pipeline validation, data contracts, schema drift detection, ML model quality
• Establish evaluation and quality frameworks for AI and agentic products — guardrail testing, hallucination detection, prompt regression testing
• Own release quality gates and define ship-or-hold criteria
• Drive root cause analysis on production incidents and escaped defects
• Manage budget, resource planning, and vendor relationships for QE
• Hire, develop, and retain world-class QE talent; build compelling career paths
• Evaluate, select, and manage QE tooling; drive build-vs-buy decisions
• Stay current with industry QE practices and represent Mastercard externally

Requirements:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with 7+ years focused on Quality Engineering at increasing levels of scope and leadership
• 5+ years managing engineering teams, including managing people leaders (managers of managers)
• Demonstrated expertise across full-stack application quality (API, UI, microservices) and data/ML system quality (pipelines, models, data platforms)
• Track record of defining and executing QE strategy at scale — not just running a test team, but transforming how an organization approaches quality
• Experience in financial services, payments, or other highly regulated technology environments
• Strong communication skills including the ability to assert quality positions to senior leadership, present to executives, and influence without authority
• Experience with budget and resource management, including forecasting, vendor management, and build-vs-buy decisions
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience