Director, AI Strategy

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, AI Strategy & Solutions DeliveryOverview
As Director, AI Strategy and Solutions Delivery, on the AI Foundations team, you will drive foundational enterprise-scale AI strategy and execution. You'll define roadmap, architect solutions, and lead cross-functional delivery to unlock and communicate measurable efficiency and innovation. Sitting at the intersection of product leadership, technical program management, and solutions architecture, you'll deliver agentic and AI solutions from strategy and portfolio shaping to solution delivery and operating model design. You will work hands-on with data scientists, ML and platform engineers, and senior business leaders to deliver high-impact use cases. This role is designed for a leader who can move from whiteboard to working solution to scaled adoption, while keeping value capture, safety, and sustainability front and centre.

This role plays a critical part in communicating impact and aligning delivery capabilities with business needs, prioritising scalable technical solutions across various domains by engaging business users, grasping the domain context, and matching capabilities to specific problem statements.

Your role
1. Developing AI-driven strategies to support business value

• Identify, qualify, and prioritize high-impact AI opportunities across business domains.

• Quantify full value at stake and value levers (efficiency, augmentation, revenue lift, risk mitigation), with clear dependencies and path to realization.

• Bring together expertise in AI, data engineering, solution architecture, and relevant business domains to design fit-for-purpose solutions leveraging LLMs, RAG, and agentic systems.

• Translate ambitious north star visions into executable plans, building alignment among relevant executives and business stakeholders on timing and delivery.

• Achieve maximum scale from AI solutions by proactively identifying and addressing barriers to scale and generalizing solutions to multiple applications.

2. Enabling rapid and iterative delivery of AI solutions with consistent value creation

• Serve as solutions architect and product owner for critical initiatives—defining scope, non-functional requirements, SLAs/SLOs, and acceptance criteria.

• Partner with AI and ML engineering leaders to manage versioning, iteration planning, and solution delivery, creating transparency for business stakeholders and proactively mitigating delivery issues.

• Build productive relationships with key business stakeholders to help them co-own the AI solutions, enabling the business to provide feedback and guidance at all stages of development.

• Bring business expertise and focus on value capture to AI problem-solving during development, helping the team to maximize impact and minimize unnecessary complexity.

• Augment our business stakeholders' teams with AI and change management expertise, helping them to realize maximum value from AI solutions.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Data & AI Ops, Privacy, AI Governance, Info Security, Architecture & Technonology, BizOps etc) to design development patterns fit for productionizing and scale.

3. Advancing our innovative operating model for AI teams

• Lead interactions with AI and ML engineering teams to develop and codify more effective ways for AI and strategy teams to collaborate.

• Monitor industry trends and emerging technologies to ensure the organization remains at the forefront of AI and automation advancements.

• Oversee the needs for documenting knowledge, creating templates, and authoring playbooks to help the team scale.

• Develop and maintain three synchronized roadmaps: stakeholder engagement & adoption, use case portfolio, and technical capabilities/platform evolution.

• Conduct peer training and author thought leadership along with other members of the team to augment the full team's skills.

• Develop new delivery frameworks and help the team build new service offerings.

All about you

• 8–12+ years hands-on leadership of technology strategies, leveraging data and ML/AI to solve complex business problems and drive measurable impact in large, regulated environments.

• Proven track record influencing and aligning executives and cross-functional teams to deliver outcomes at scale.

• Strong communicator—executive presence, crisp storytelling, and the ability to translate complex technical concepts into actionable business strategy.

• Prior experience in strategy, planning, or product roadmap management is crucial, as this role involves shaping strategic direction, rolling out capability roadmaps, and managing internal communications.

• Highly competent problem solving and solutioning skills; able to demonstrate business need as well as technical solution discovery and design

• Proven experience in productionizing AI capabilities based on large datasets, and modern AI patterns (LLMs, RAG, vector databases, embeddings, prompt/response optimization, agents & tools).

• Practical understanding of evaluation and safety for AI/ML solutions (offline/online testing, adversarial testing, guardrails, telemetry, policy enforcement).
The following skills are preferred

• Knowledge of cloud computing (Databricks, AWS) and architecture, big data management, and ML platform tools is a plus

• Experience in the financial institutions or payments industry

• Familiarity with agile methodologies

• People management experience

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.

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