Senior Technical Program Manager at Mastercard in Arlington, VA

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

Senior Technical Program Manager

Overview: Mastercard's Portfolio Intelligence team, part of the Services organization, is seeking a Senior Technical Program Manager to help drive the delivery of innovative, data-driven solutions at scale. The ideal candidate is a hands-on and collaborative execution leader who can operate with a high degree of autonomy, bring structure to ambiguous and complex initiatives, and drive predictable outcomes across multiple teams and stakeholders. The Senior TPM will lead day-to-day program execution, manage cross-team dependencies, and partner closely with engineering, product, and stakeholder teams across Mastercard to ensure alignment and delivery. Our team builds high-performance analytics platforms that enable businesses around the world to unlock greater value from their data and make smarter decisions. This role will ensure work is clearly defined, appropriately sized, prioritized, tracked, and delivered with consistency, transparency, and accountability across teams. This role requires the ability to operate at both strategic and tactical levels by translating priorities into executable plans, proactively identifying risks, solving problems, and continuously improving how teams plan, govern, and deliver work.

This is a hybrid position based in Arlington, VA, requiring three days per week onsite.

Role: • Own end-to-end execution of Portfolio Intelligence initiatives, ensuring work is clearly scoped, prioritized, planned, tracked, and delivered. • Build and maintain integrated program plans that account for milestones, sequencing, dependencies, constraints, risks, and contingency planning. • Drive accountability across engineering, product, stakeholder, and partner teams by ensuring owners, actions, decisions, blockers, and delivery commitments are clear and actively managed. • Partner across Mastercard to align priorities, manage dependencies, remove blockers, and ensure consistent progress toward delivery outcomes. • Bring sufficient technical depth to understand the program domain, participate in solution discussions, ask effective questions, and help engineering teams navigate blockers without being expected to write code. • Serve as the source of truth for program status, providing clear, concise, and data-driven updates to the right audiences at the right time. • Proactively identify risks, issues, and execution gaps, escalate when appropriate, and drive timely decisions to protect delivery timelines. • Define and track execution metrics that improve transparency, predictability, and accountability across the program. • Lead effective operating mechanisms, including planning sessions, status reviews, dependency reviews, risk reviews, and retrospectives. • Drive alignment across a portfolio of initiatives by evaluating business and technical trade-offs and partnering across teams to optimize execution approaches, technology adoption, and operating models. • Continuously improve how teams plan, govern, measure, and deliver work by identifying process gaps and driving practical improvements.

All About You: • Proven experience delivering complex technology projects as a Technical Program Manager, Technical Project Manager, or similar role. • Understanding of Agile and hybrid delivery models, the software development lifecycle, and how to drive execution across multiple engineering teams. • Technical depth and judgment to navigate ambiguity, structure complex technical problems, and turn loosely defined priorities into executable plans. • Ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable insights for non-technical stakeholders. • Systems-level thinking with the ability to partner with engineering on architecture, APIs, and platform decisions. • Data-driven mindset with the ability to use metrics, dashboards, and delivery health indicators to improve transparency, predictability, and program outcomes. • Passionate about continuous improvement and have experience improving team processes, operating mechanisms, delivery quality, and accountability. • Strong servant leadership, interpersonal, and negotiation skills, with a focus on enabling teams and fostering collaboration. • Hands-on curiosity and willingness to dive deep into platform capabilities, underlying technologies, and evolving industry trends. • Experience with tools such as Jira, Confluence, Aha!, Power BI, EasyBI, MS Project, or similar project management and collaboration platforms. • Experience driving organizational change, adoption, and continuous process improvement. • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with strong executive presence. • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

This role is not eligible for Mastercard’s work authorization sponsorship. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States now and in the future without employer sponsorship.

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 reasonable_accommodation@mastercard.com 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. Mastercard benefits for interns generally include: 56 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time; jury duty leave; and on-site fitness facilities in some locations.

Pay Ranges Arlington, Virginia: $110,000 - $187,000 USD