Director, Sales Incentive Design & Strategy

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, Sales Incentive Design & Strategy

Director, Sales Incentives Design and Strategy

Overview:

Mastercard is investing in a transformation of our global sales incentives across plan design, data transformation, systems implementation and operations. This transformation is a critical step in modernizing how we reward performance, scale our selling motions, evolve pipeline performance and support sustained growth. This initiative upgrades sales incentives across the enterprise to market‑benchmarked, globally aligned programs, while significantly improving transparency, governance, and operational efficiency.
The Director of Sales Incentives is responsible for the execution of transformation and subsequent annual calendar of strategy, design, optimize and govern sales incentives design for our regional and specialty sales organization. You will translate the GTM strategy into scalable, compliant, and motivating incentives that drive growth, profitability and seller performance worldwide.

Role:
The role holder will be responsible for leading a dedicated team to deliver the following outcomes:
• Enterprise sales incentive strategy & governance: Own the global design standards for incentive plans and sales awards across regional and specialist selling roles, ensuring consistency, fairness, and alignment to annual business strategy across all regions.
• Role eligibility: Define/maintain role groupings (generalist vs. specialist), eligibility rules, crediting principles, and participation guidelines for incentives and awards globally.
• Pay mix & benchmarking: Set and maintain pay mix targets (base/incentive leverage) and market benchmarking inputs by role/level/geo to support competitiveness and talent outcomes.
• Plan design & mechanics: Design plan structures and mechanics (measures, weighting, thresholds, quotas/targets, gates, accelerators, decelerators, caps/floors) that reinforce desired selling behaviors and profitable growth.
• Financial modeling & scenario analytics: Build and maintain detailed payout and cost models (sensitivity, attainment distributions, ROI, funding rates, dilution/overachievement risk) to support annual plan changes and in-year adjustments.
• Behavior-to-metric alignment: Translate annual strategy into measurable selling behaviors and ensure plan measures/accelerators drive the right outcomes (e.g., new logo, renewals, penetration, product mix, multi-rail growth).
• Global awards program ownership: Own the end-to-end design framework for sales awards (categories, criteria, scoring, nomination workflows, governance, and auditability) across regions and specialist teams.
• Country compliance & filings: Coordinate with legal, finance, payroll, and local HR to support country-specific requirements (regulatory/tax considerations, works councils where relevant, required notifications/filings).
• Plan documentation & controls: Produce and manage global/regional plan documents, terms & conditions, payout calendars, FAQs, and change-control/versioning; ensure clarity, defensibility, and audit readiness.
• Annual planning cycle enablement: Partner with Sales, Finance, and HR to run the annual design/modeling cycle—timelines, design decisions, trade-offs, and executive-ready materials supporting approvals.

The ideal candidate should have:
• Experience in designing and operating standardized program frameworks and governance structures
• Ability to translate insights into actionable plans
• Strong business acumen and commercial awareness
• Strategic and collaborative work approach across various business lines, functions, and regions
• Excellent managerial, interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills

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 con