Vice President, Product Architect @ Mastercard

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, Product Architect

The Product Architect is responsible for defining, documenting, and communicating the technical and functional vision for one or more product areas. This role acts as a bridge between business strategy and engineering execution, beginning with the transformation of high‑level business requirements into clear, actionable product requirements. The Product Architect then drives the creation of product definition and architecture artifacts that guide engineering teams toward scalable, secure, high‑quality solutions.

Key Responsibilities

1. Business Requirement Translation & Product Requirements Definition

• Engage with business stakeholders to understand problem statements, desired outcomes, use cases, and constraints.
• Analyse high‑level business needs to identify functional requirements, non-functional requirements, edge cases, and dependencies.
• Produce Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) including:
• Detailed functional requirements
• Defined user personas and use cases
• Acceptance criteria and success metrics
• Process flows and early conceptual diagrams
• Ensure the PRD provides sufficient clarity and traceability for downstream design and architecture.
• Partner with product managers to align the PRD with strategic and commercial objectives.

2. Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Translate PRD-defined requirements into end‑to‑end product architecture.
• Produce high-quality architectural deliverables, such as:
• System architecture diagrams
• Logical and physical data models
• Integration patterns, event models, and system interactions
• Define architectural principles and guardrails for engineering teams.

3. Product Definition & Solution Design

• Develop detailed solution definitions derived from PRD requirements, including:
• Sequence diagrams and inter-service flows
• Domain models and bounded contexts
• API specifications (OpenAPI/Swagger)
• User journey → system interaction mappings
• Data contracts and schemas
• Conduct technical option evaluations, trade-off analyses, and feasibility assessments.
• Contribute to roadmap shaping by identifying architectural investments and dependencies.

4. Engineering Collaboration & Technical Leadership

• Work closely with engineering teams to ensure solution delivery aligns with the PRD and architectural design.
• Lead design reviews, clarify requirements, and provide guidance throughout implementation.
• Build technical prototypes or PoCs when needed to validate complex or emerging concepts.
• Maintain clear, accessible documentation for engineering, QA, and cross-functional partners.

5. Governance, Quality, and Risk Management

• Ensure architectural compliance with enterprise standards, security, privacy, and regulatory obligations.
• Produce governance-focused artifacts such as:
• Threat models
• Data lineage and retention definitions
• Performance, scalability, and observability requirements
• Identify architectural and requirement-related risks early; propose mitigation strategies.

6. Cross‑Functional Influence & Communication

• Act as a trusted advisor for product, engineering, operations, and business leadership.
• Communicate architectural decisions and trade-offs to non-technical audiences with clarity.
• Develop reusable templates for PRDs, architecture documents, diagrams, and technical patterns.

Typical Artifacts Produced

The Product Architect may deliver or own the following artifacts:

Product Definition Artifacts

• Product Requirements Document (PRD)
• Use-case definitions
• Process flows and conceptual interaction diagrams
• Functional & non-functional requirement specifications

Architecture & Design Artifacts

• System architecture diagrams
• Sequence diagrams
• State machine diagrams
• Domain models & DDD bounded contexts
• Logical/physical data models & ERDs
• Data flow diagrams
• API specifications & interface contracts
• Event schemas & event-driven architecture maps

Governance & Quality Artifacts

• Threat models
• Security design documentation
• Performance/Scalability specifications
• Observability and logging requirements
• Compliance and data retention models

Qualifications

Required

• Extensive experience in software architecture, solution design, or senior engineering roles.
• Demonstrated ability to translate high-level business inputs into detailed PRDs and architectural deliverables.
• Experience designing modern distributed systems (microservices, cloud-native architectures, event-driven patterns, APIs).
• Strong communication and stakeholder engagement skills across business and technical domains.

Preferred

• Familiarity with Azure, AWS, or GCP cloud architectures.
• Strong collaboration experience within multi-team or multi-product organisations.

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.