Principal Data Platform Architect

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
Principal Data Platform Architect
Overview
Mastercard is seeking a highly influential Principal Data Platform Architect to help define and deliver the next generation of enterprise data capabilities.
This role will lead the design and evolution of strategic platforms that simplify how external data is securely exchanged with Mastercard and enable product teams, consultants, and analysts to more easily discover, access, and leverage enterprise data. The successful candidate will help transform complex, fragmented data processes into scalable, self-service experiences that accelerate innovation and unlock greater value from Mastercard's data assets.
Key Responsibilities
Define Enterprise Data Platform Strategy
Drive the technical vision and architecture for enterprise data onboarding, exchange, discovery, and consumption capabilities.
Develop roadmaps that balance immediate business needs with long-term platform scalability and reuse.
Identify opportunities to simplify and standardize recurring data workflows across Mastercard.
Enable Frictionless Data Exchange
Design capabilities that streamline the secure onboarding, sharing, and management of external data.
Establish reusable patterns for data integration, governance, observability, lineage, and compliance.
Reduce reliance on bespoke solutions through automation and self-service capabilities.
Democratize Access to Data
Create intuitive ways for product teams, consultants, analysts, and AI-powered solutions to discover and utilize trusted enterprise data.
Enable self-service analytics and rapid solution development without requiring deep technical expertise.
Partner with governance and security teams to balance accessibility with appropriate controls.
Provide Technical Leadership
Serve as a technical authority across multiple engineering organizations.
Influence architecture and technology decisions without direct authority.
Establish engineering standards, best practices, and reference architectures.
Mentor engineers and architects across the organization.
Partner Across the Business
Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Data Governance, Security, and business stakeholders to solve complex data challenges.
Translate business needs into scalable technical solutions.
Build alignment around platform investments and strategic priorities.
All About You
Extensive experience architecting and building large-scale data platforms, distributed systems, and enterprise integration solutions across both on-premises and cloud environments, leveraging technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, NiFi, Hadoop/Cloudera, Databricks, and modern cloud-native data services.
Deep expertise in data engineering, data architecture, data integration, and cloud-native platforms.
Experience building reusable platforms that serve multiple products, teams, or business domains.
Strong understanding of data governance, privacy, security, metadata, and data quality practices.
Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across organizations.
Exceptional communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Proven track record of translating ambiguous business challenges into scalable technical solutions.
Proficiency in Python, SQL, and data ecosystems (Oracle, AWS Glue, Azure Data Factory, BigQuery, Snowflake, etc.).
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.