Director, AI Strategy & Solutions Delivery

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, AI Strategy & Solutions Delivery

Reporting to a VP in the Mastercard AI Center of Excellence, this role drives enterprise-scale AI and automation strategy and execution. You’ll define the roadmap, architect solutions, and lead cross-functional delivery to unlock measurable efficiency and innovation. Sitting at the intersection of product leadership, technical program management, and intelligent solutions architecture, you’ll deliver agentic automation and AI solutions from strategy and portfolio shaping to solution delivery and operating model design. You will work hands-on with data scientists, ML and platform engineers, and senior business leaders to deliver high-impact use cases; and, when the use case calls for it, lead data science teams in model developing in shaping modeling strategy, evaluation frameworks, and production pathways to value. This role is designed for a leader who can move from whiteboard to working solution to scaled adoption, while keeping value capture, safety, and sustainability front and center. This role is responsible for ensuring value creation by:
• Developing long-term strategies to build AI solutions that maximize business value
• Enabling rapid and iterative execution of AI projects
• Augmenting our innovative AI operating model by creating processes, establishing standards, and contributing thought leadership

The Role
1. Developing AI-driven strategies to support business value
o Identify, qualify, and prioritize high-impact AI, analytics, and agentic automation opportunities across business domains.
o Quantify full value at stake and value levers (automation, augmentation, revenue lift, risk mitigation), with clear dependencies and path to realization.
o Bring together expertise in AI, data engineering, solution architecture, and relevant business domains to design fit-for-purpose solutions leveraging LLMs, RAG, and agentic automation.
o Translate ambitious north star visions into executable plans, building alignment among relevant executives and business stakeholders on timing and delivery.
o Achieve maximum scale from AI solutions by proactively identifying and addressing barriers to scale and generalizing solutions to multiple applications.
o Partner with Microsoft and internal platform teams on best practices for Copilot Studio, Azure OpenAI, and Power Platform governance to ensure enterprise-grade scalability, security, and compliance.

2. Enabling rapid and iterative delivery of AI solutions with consistent value creation
o Serve as solutions architect and product owner for critical initiatives—defining scope, non-functional requirements, SLAs/SLOs, and acceptance criteria.
o Partner with AI and ML engineering leaders to manage versioning, iteration planning, and solution delivery, creating transparency for business stakeholders and proactively mitigating delivery issues.
o Build productive relationships with key business stakeholders to help them co-own the AI solutions, enabling the business to provide feedback and guidance at all stages of development.
o Bring business expertise and focus on value capture to AI problem-solving during development, helping the team to maximize impact and minimize unnecessary complexity.
o Augment our business stakeholders’ teams with AI and change management expertise, helping them to realize maximum value from AI solutions.

3. Advancing our innovative operating model for AI teams
o Lead interactions with AI and ML engineering teams to develop and codify more effective ways for AI and strategy teams to collaborate.
o Monitor industry trends and emerging technologies to ensure the organization remains at the forefront of AI and automation advancements.
o Oversee the needs for documenting knowledge, creating templates, and authoring playbooks to help the team scale.
o Develop and maintain three synchronized roadmaps: stakeholder engagement & adoption, use case portfolio, and technical capabilities/platform evolution.
o Conduct peer training and author thought leadership along with other members of the team to augment the full team’s skills.
o Develop new delivery frameworks and help the team build new service offerings.

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