Director Data Scientist

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 Scientist

Director, Data Science

Overview

We believe in the power of data to transform the way we do business. As part of our Finance Modernization initiative, we are reimagining how AI and Data Analytics, drive insight, efficiency, and strategic decision making.

The Global Business Services Center (GBSC) Analytics & Automation team is a hub of innovation. an idea incubator composed of strong contributors with leadership capabilities, business acumen, and technical expertise. The team identifies ways to leverage data and AI for answering business questions and driving operational efficiency. We innovate using AI and data analysis techniques to discover actionable insights and communicate data in new and more effective ways for influencing business decisions, encouraging, improving processes and productivity, and overall evolving the way we do business.

As Director, Data Science, you will drive foundational AI strategy and execution for business operations. You will define roadmap, architect solutions, and lead cross-functional delivery to unlock and communicate measurable efficiency and innovation. You will work hands-on with data scientists, ML and platform engineers, and senior business leaders to deliver high-impact use cases.

Your Role And Responsibilities

• Develop AI-driven strategies to support business value.
• Identify, qualify, and prioritize high-impact AI opportunities across business domains.
• Translate north star vision into executable plans, building alignment among relevant executives and business stakeholders on timing and delivery.
• Enable quick and iterative delivery of AI solutions with consistent value creation.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Finance BAs, Privacy, AI Governance, Info Security, BizOps, etc.) to design development patterns fit for productionizing and scale.
• 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.
• Oversee the end-to-end implementation of data science and AI solutions—from concept and prototype through deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.
• Develop and maintain a value realization framework that quantifies the business impact of data science initiatives (e.g., cost optimization, working capital improvements, revenue enhancement, or process automation).
• Continuously evaluate and refine models and solutions to maximize financial and operational outcomes.
• Lead and manage the ML Ops team, ensuring scalable deployment, automation, and monitoring of machine learning models across environments.
  
  
  

All About You

• 10 to 12+ years hands-on leadership of technology strategies, leveraging data and 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.
• 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).
  
  
  

Good to Have

• Experience in the financial institutions or payments industry.
• Knowledge of cloud computing (Databricks, AWS).
• Familiarity with agile methodologies
  
  
  

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.

---