Lead Technical Program Manager - AI Foundations and Agents

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

Lead Technical Program Manager (L6)

AI Foundations & Agents

The AI Foundations & Agents team is responsible for accelerating the development and adoption of generative AI and agentic capabilities across Business & Market Insights (B&MI). Our mission is to enable product teams to bring intelligent, customer-facing experiences to market faster by providing shared platforms, reusable services, engineering enablement, and best practices.

Rather than having each product team independently solve the same foundational challenges, we develop common capabilities that reduce duplication, streamline implementation, and simplify the path from experimentation to production. We partner closely with product, engineering, architecture, and data teams across B&MI to create scalable foundations that allow teams to focus on delivering business value.

Technical Program Managers at Mastercard collaborate to define the how and when of strategic delivery. Within AI Foundations & Agents, this role serves as a key execution leader, helping the engineering team operate efficiently, deliver predictably, and continuously improve how work gets done.

We are seeking a Technical Program Manager who is passionate about operational excellence, engineering effectiveness, and cross-functional coordination. This individual will work closely with a development team to establish strong execution practices, drive delivery outcomes, and support the continued growth of AI capabilities across B&MI.

About the Role

Partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Architects, and Engineers to drive the successful delivery of platform and enablement initiatives.

Own and continuously improve team operating rhythms, delivery processes, release management, planning, and execution practices.

Help ensure the team can efficiently deliver foundational capabilities that enable B&MI product organizations to rapidly develop and deploy agentic solutions.

Responsibilities

• Drive planning, execution, and tracking of engineering initiatives from concept through production deployment.
• Coordinate releases across multiple stakeholders and dependent teams.
• Facilitate sprint planning, backlog refinement, execution reviews, retrospective activities, and program increment planning activities as appropriate.
• Identify delivery risks, dependencies, and blockers, and proactively drive resolution.
• Establish mechanisms that improve delivery predictability, transparency, and accountability.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to align roadmap objectives with execution plans.
• Monitor team health, capacity, throughput, and delivery metrics.
• Support operational readiness activities, including release coordination and adoption planning.
• Create clear communication channels for leadership updates, program reporting, and stakeholder engagement.
• Continuously improve team efficiency through process optimization, automation opportunities, and better ways of working.
• Program Execution & Delivery
• Manage day-to-day delivery activities for the AI Foundations & Agents engineering team.
• Create and maintain delivery plans, release schedules, milestones, and dependency tracking.
• Coordinate work across engineering, product, architecture, security, and platform teams.
• Drive execution against commitments and strategic objectives.
• Release & Operational Management
• Lead release planning and readiness activities.
• Coordinate production deployments and cross-team release dependencies.
• Track operational risks and ensure appropriate mitigation plans are in place.
• Help establish repeatable and scalable release management practices.
• Engineering Process Excellence
• Facilitate Agile ceremonies and team operating cadences.
• Improve planning accuracy and delivery predictability.
• Establish metrics and reporting mechanisms that provide visibility into team performance and execution health.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives focused on engineering efficiency and team effectiveness.
• Stakeholder Coordination
• Serve as a central point of coordination across Product, Engineering, Architecture, Security, and platform teams.
• Communicate program status, risks, decisions, and milestones to stakeholders.
• Ensure alignment across teams contributing to shared AI platforms and services.
• All About You
• The ideal candidate is highly organized, execution-focused, and passionate about helping engineering teams operate at their best.
• Required Experience
• Significant experience managing software engineering programs in Agile environments.
• Proven ability to drive delivery across multiple stakeholders and dependent teams.
• Experience managing releases, dependencies, risks, and execution planning.
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle practices and modern engineering organizations.
• Experience facilitating Agile ceremonies and improving team delivery processes.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to identify operational inefficiencies and implement improvements.
• Experience using program management and delivery tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, or equivalent platforms.
• Preferred Experience
• Experience supporting platform engineering, developer enablement, or shared services teams.
• Familiarity with modern AI, machine learning, or generative AI technologies.
• Experience working with cloud-native applications and distributed systems.
• Experience measuring and improving engineering productivity and delivery effectiveness.
• Understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, and software release management practices.
• What Success Looks Like
• After 12 months, the successful candidate will have:
• Established highly effective delivery and planning processes for the AI Foundations & Agents team.
• Improved delivery predictability, transparency, and execution quality.
• Reduced friction in releasing and adopting shared AI capabilities.
• Increased engineering team efficiency through better operating practices and process improvements.
• Built strong partnerships with B&MI product teams consuming platform services.
• Helped scale the team's ability to enable agentic solutions across the B&MI product portfolio.
• Enabled engineers to spend more time building and less time managing coordination, planning, and operational overhead.
• 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.