Director, Data 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 Director, Data Engineering 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 The Mastercard Services Technology team is looking for Director of Data Engineering, to drive our mission to unlock potential of data assets by consistently innovating, eliminating friction in how we manage big data assets, store those assets, accessibility of data and, enforce standards and principles in the Big Data space both on public cloud and on-premise set up. This is a high-impact role where the person will be responsible for driving the design and implementation of modern, scalable, and secure data platforms across AWS and Azure. The scope of the role includes establishing platform strategy, enforcing governance, defining and propagating best practices across Data Platforms. The role will also involve collaborating with cross-geography teams of data engineers and platform engineers. We’re not just looking for an architect—we want a builder, mentor, and leader who thrives in fast-paced environments and takes pride in delivering real, measurable value. If you enjoy rolling up your sleeves while shaping long-term strategy, this role is for you. Role • Design and architect end-to-end cloud-native solutions with a focus on modern data platforms, including Lakehouse architectures leveraging S3, Azure Data Lake, Databricks, and related tools. • Provide technology leadership and people leadership to a team of global engineers. • Lead by doing – drive DevOps initiatives including CI/CD pipeline creation, infrastructure-as-code implementation, and automated environment provisioning across multi-cloud environments. • Set and enforce cloud security best practices, including IAM, encryption, network security, and regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA). • Establish and enforce enterprise-grade data governance frameworks, including data cataloging, lineage, classification, and access control, leveraging tools like Lake Formation or Azure Purview. • Design and lead implementation of robust data engineering pipelines, including ETL/ELT, data lakes, and data warehouses. • Implement Lakehouse architectures using the medallion model (Bronze, Silver, Gold) with deep integration into AWS services (Glue, Lake Formation) and analytics engines (Databricks, EMR, Athena). • Translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions, working closely with product, engineering, and data stakeholders. • Mentor and guide engineers and DevOps teams, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement. • Continuously monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize infrastructure and data workflows for performance, reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency. • Document architecture decisions and operational standards and help establish technical best practices across teams. • Stay ahead o