Job Description

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

VP of Architecture, Open FinanceVP, Architecture – Open Finance

Open Finance is redefining how financial data is accessed, shared, and used. At Mastercard, we are building a global platform that gives consumers and businesses secure, intelligent control over their financial data—powering account aggregation, payments, and real-time decisioning.
This is a multi-region, market-facing platform operating across the US, Europe, and APAC with strict data residency requirements, high availability expectations, and strong trust guarantees. The architecture spans API gateways, identity and consent, distributed data systems, analytics platforms, and regulated integrations with financial institutions.

The challenges are real:
- Designing systems that scale globally but behave locally
- Evolving platforms while introducing breaking changes safely
- Keeping architecture clean as complexity grows across regions and products
- Enforcing standards without slowing delivery

Architecture is central to how we solve these problems.

We are looking for a VP of Architecture to lead the technical direction of Open Finance platforms. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who has built complex systems, made difficult trade-offs, and delivered real outcomes.

Role
In this role, you will:

- Own the architecture of Open Finance platforms end-to-end, ensuring systems are scalable, resilient, secure, and adaptable across markets
- Define and drive the long-term architectural vision and translate it into clear, executable direction
- Lead and develop a distributed team of senior architects across regions
- Make and defend high-stakes trade-offs across Engineering, Product, and business priorities
- Lead platform evolution—modernising systems, reducing complexity, and preparing for future scale
- Drive alignment across teams through clear standards, strong communication, and decisive leadership
- Proactively manage stakeholders and expectations across engineering, product, and leadership
- Communicate effectively at all levels, from deep technical design to executive direction
- Ensure architecture decisions result in systems that are delivered, deployed, and operate successfully

All About You
Core requirements
The ideal candidate:

- Has designed and delivered highly available, distributed systems at scale with clean, maintainable architectures
- Has worked across multiple domains and problem spaces, bringing breadth of perspective
- Has led complex platform migrations, including breaking backwards compatibility where required
- Has introduced significant architectural change—simplifying or modernising systems meaningfully
- Owns architecture end-to-end: vision, strategy, and execution
- Has built platforms that operate across multiple regions with differing constraints
- Ramps quickly, builds context fast, and becomes effective early
- Has strong technical grounding in data storage systems, networking fundamentals, and cloud infrastructure

Leadership and impact
Strong candidates will also:

- Define and enforce architectural principles and standards that enable speed without fragmentation
- Translate strategy into actionable roadmaps and drive execution
- Influence across engineering, product, and leadership to resolve competing priorities
- Lead through ambiguity and drive clarity in complex situations
- Mentor senior architects and raise the overall technical bar
- Balance innovation with risk—ensuring security, reliability, and compliance without over-engineering
- Communicate clearly and concisely to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Maintain a strong bias for delivery and measurable outcomes

Desirable

- Experience building or evolving regulated financial or data-intensive platforms
- Experience operating in multi-region environments with data residency constraints
- Experience simplifying complex platforms and reducing technical sprawl
- Pragmatic use of automation or AI to improve engineering productivity

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.