Lead Data Engineer

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 Data Engineer Overview: Mastercard’s Enterprise Credit Risk (ECR) team is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to design and scale the next generation of data platforms that power credit decisioning, portfolio risk management, regulatory reporting, analytics, and AI-driven insights across Mastercard’s lending and risk ecosystems. In this role, you will combine deep hands-on data engineering expertise with technical leadership to build reliable, scalable, governed, and high-quality data products. You will lead the architecture and implementation of modern data engineering solutions across cloud platforms, large-scale data processing, data governance, and operational excellence. You will partner closely with Product Management, Risk Analytics, Data Science, Architecture, Engineering, and Business stakeholders to transform complex business needs into scalable technical solutions, simplify access to trusted data, and accelerate innovation across the ECR portfolio. This is a hybrid role based in O’Fallon, MO, requiring three days per week onsite. Role: • Lead the design, development, and evolution of enterprise-grade data platforms and pipelines supporting credit risk products, decisioning capabilities, analytics, and regulatory reporting. • Architect and implement scalable ETL/ELT frameworks using Databricks, Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and cloud-native technologies to support high-volume data workloads. • Drive data platform modernization and cloud transformation, including the migration of legacy data assets to modern cloud-based and Data Lakehouse architectures. • Establish and advance data quality, lineage, metadata, governance, observability, and monitoring capabilities to deliver trusted, compliant, and reliable data products. • Partner across Risk, Product, Data Science, Architecture, Engineering, and Business teams to translate complex requirements into scalable, sustainable technical solutions. • Define and promote engineering standards and best practices across coding, testing, data quality, deployment automation, documentation, and operational excellence. • Lead technical design reviews and influence architectural decisions for data-intensive applications, platforms, and services. • Optimize large-scale data workloads and platforms for performance, reliability, scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency. • Build reusable, governed data products and capabilities that enable AI, machine learning, advanced analytics, and emerging risk use cases. • Drive technical initiatives from strategy through execution, identifying dependencies, managing technical risks, and ensuring solutions align with business priorities and long-term platform strategy. • Mentor and coach engineers across the organization, providing technical guidance, design expertise, knowledge sharing, and feedback to strengthen engineering capabilities. • Shape technology roadmaps and delivery priorities across the ECR portfolio, balancing business value, engineering feasibility, risk, compliance, and long-term platform sustainability. • Ensure engineering solutions meet security, privacy, regulatory, compliance, and audit requirements through appropriate controls, documentation, and engineering practices. • Create clarity in complex and ambiguous