Vice President, Data Science

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

Vice President, Data Science

Overview
The Security Solutions (SSO) Data Science organization at Mastercard is at the forefront of leveraging AI to secure the legitimate movement of money for everyone. As we scale our global data science capabilities, we seek a highly accomplished Vice President of Data Science to lead horizontal enablement for our SSO data science group. This role will focus on MLOps, data science platform and tooling, and a data engineering group with a mission to integrate data from mergers and acquisitions.

This VP will champion the standardization and operationalization of data science, building a flexible, resilient, and scalable ecosystem that empowers vertical data science teams. You will work across product lines, ensuring the best practices, infrastructure, and data pipelines are shared and leveraged for maximum organizational impact.

Role
As the VP of Data Science, Horizontal Enablement, you will:
• Lead a dedicated horizontal team supporting all SSO Data Science verticals by building, operating, and optimizing MLOps, ML platform, and advanced tooling environments.
• Establish, grow, and guide a data engineering group responsible for integrating data assets from organizational acquisitions into Mastercard’s unified data environment.
• Collaborate with senior leaders and vertical product teams to identify and remove barriers to connected intelligence, ensuring data flows seamlessly across teams and products.
• Drive the standardization of data science engineering practices, encouraging repeatable, resilient, and industrialized processes across the SSO group.
• Champion the use of advanced MLOps toolchains, cloud and on-premise data science platforms, and modern data engineering techniques (e.g., Databricks, Spark, Kubernetes, API management, CI/CD pipelines).
• Ensure that data science enablement—shared feature sets, model performance monitoring, and common tooling—is executed to the highest standards.
• Foster a culture of endless curiosity, excellence through improvisation, and enterprising autonomy within your teams, aligning with team core values.
• Develop and nurture strategic partnerships with product, and engineering groups to anticipate and deliver on future data and AI needs.
• Champion best practices for integrating messy, disparate, and unstructured data, particularly from newly acquired entities, ensuring quality, compliance, and rapid time-to-insight.
• Guide your teams to provide horizontal subject matter expertise, extra capacity, and strategic guidance to vertical teams as needed.
• Design, develop, and own SSO data science platforms, driving innovation in MLOps and data operations for all AI/ML products.
• Standardize ML lifecycle management—including data extraction, preparation, modeling, deployment, evaluation, and monitoring—across diverse products and domains.
• Integrate data from acquisitions, aligning disparate sources with existing governance and platform standards.
• Scale platform capabilities to petabyte data volumes, supporting both real-time and batch ML workflows.
• Collaborate with vertical data science and engineering teams to prioritize and advance connected intelligence use cases.
• Ensure alignment with organizational goals, including clarity, resilience, and scalability of all systems and teams.
• Contribute to and help shape the strategic direction of SSO Data Science.

All About You

Essential Skills and Experience:
• Proven experience leading large, multidisciplinary data science and data engineering teams in a matrix or horizontal model, supporting multiple products.
• Demonstrated expertise in MLOps, ML platform architecture, and tooling (Databricks, Spark, CI/CD, cloud and on-prem environments).
• Extensive track record of integrating complex, semi-structured, and disparate data sets into production data pipelines.
• Hands-on knowledge of Python, PySpark, SQL, and related ML/Big Data technologies.
• Strong grounding in data governance, AI/ML model lifecycle, and operating at petabyte scale.
• Experience working across organizational boundaries to standardize and scale data science processes.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and relationship-building skills; ability to influence at all levels.
• Self-motivated, curious, accountable, and relentlessly focused on excellence and delivery.
• Minimum BSc in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related STEM field; advanced degrees strongly preferred.
• Experience in payments, fraud detection, or regulated industries is highly desirable.

Nice to Have:
• PhD or Master's in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or relevant STEM discipline.
• Experience operationalizing AI/ML models in the context of financial crime, identity, cyber, or authorization domains.
• Expertise with advanced data engineering for feature stores, real-time event processing, and horizontal enablement at enterprise scale.

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 [email protected] 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 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.

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.

Pay Ranges

O'Fallon, Missouri: $230,000 - $368,000 USD