Lead Technical Program Manager

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 Technical Program Manager

Who is Mastercard?
Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential.
Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.
Overview
Real-Time Payments (RTP) offer immediate transfer and detailed messaging options for A2A (Account to Account) payments and are critical on Mastercard’s journey for Multi-Rail Payments. Real Time Payments are categorized as Critical National Infrastructure for respective countries’ and requires high benchmark of resilience, availability, quality, and scalability.
The Real Time Payments team is looking for a Lead Technical Program Manager with proven experience in Program Management. Are you:
A self starter who is able to take full ownership of project plans without much need for Knowledge Transition/Training by self reading available documents.
Able Conceptualize, rationalize, and drive multiple simultaneous projects to deliver engineering work across the portfolio.
Role
All staff at Mastercard are expected to demonstrate 'Mastercard Way' every day – create value for our customers, partners and colleagues; grow together to achieve our goals and move faston what matters most for our customers and Mastercard
As Technical Program Manager, you will:
• Support multiple teams with implementation of agile rules - rules of scrum, build in quality and limiting work in progress.
• Be a trained team facilitator and be continuously engaged in challenging the old norms of development to improve performance in the areas of quality, predictability, flow, and velocity.
• Enable cadence and Synchronization across multiple teams so the individual team’s backlogs and solutions are understood, resolved, and integrated.
• Close collaboration with the product management to keep the backlog healthy, groomed and purged.
• Organize and accelerate a group of related product engineering backlog items or activities across multiple teams, aligning dependent organizations. Identify and remove blockers and always find the path forward in challenging situations
• Facilitate alignment of dependencies between the program team and third parties, release managers and other teams outside of the train
• Create mechanisms to effectively report out and control execution. Recognize complexity and create predictable delivery paths for large and/or complex efforts. Measurably improve, streamline, and/or eliminate excess processes. Utilize cross organizational mechanisms to describe and drive continuous improvements.
• Drive execution of an outcome from inception through successful delivery through the full stack of the services / domains, or, an outcome that spans multiple teams and integrations across the enterprise.
• Be looked to as first point of contact for your team or area. and maintain the backlogs as transparent source of truth for status providing the right information and associated data visually about the state backlog of the project to the right all the audience at the right all times. Maintain backlogs as always on information radiators on batch size and flow of work.
• Understand the business strategy and design approaches within product, program or domain with depth to be credible and effective with teams they work with. Competently and independently represent team’s services.
• Keep abreast of evolving technology landscape. Ask the right questions to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of designs (scalability, latency, security, performance, data integrity, etc.)
• Work with ambiguity and with limited guidance. The business outcome, program, and/or product strategy is defined, but nothing else is. Be able to get the inertia out and the epic in motion or able to get the entropy out and start the agile ceremonies for a calm and predictable delivery pattern
• Transform raw thoughts into clear and concise communications/instructions to the teams through backlog grooming. Can communicate with confidence 3+ levels up using transparent backlog.
• Understand the needs of the engineers and technical operations teams who have to build, maintain, and operate the services and technical assets
• Regularly review metrics and proactively seek out new and improved data/mechanisms for visibility ensuring your program stays aligned with organization objectives
• Conflict resolution: Must be able to facilitate discussions and enable alternatives and different approaches
• Develop and maintain project management plans, including project timelines, budgets, and people allocation
• Identify, communicate and mitigate project risks
• Actively contribute to the Mastercard’s SAFe and Agile community and knowledge base
All About You
The ideal candidate for this position should:
• Anticipate bottlenecks and adequately factor in contingency for unplanned delays
• Determine if success metrics are in place and if not, you work to define them
• Recognize discordant views and take part in constructive dialog to resolve them
• Continuously assess development processes, test plans, and operations. You work with teams to improve concurrent project delivery.
• Streamline and/or eliminate excess process in any area of the architecture, production operations environment, or business area where the same efforts (or issues) are repeated year-over-year
• Expert with scrum delivery
• Knowledge and skills using program management tools (JIRA, Confluence, AHA, etc.)
Nice to have:
Past experience in building and maintaining Critical National Infrastructure
Past experience working in Payments Space
Experience in FX, SWIFT or ACH systems, especially acquired within a bank is a major plus

Work Schedules
We currently operate a hybrid working pattern which allows colleagues to gain a work life balance with the requirement to work from the office and home for part of the week
Open to working flexible hours that overlap with European time zones
Corporate Security Responsibility
Every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security. All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and therefore, it is expected that the successful candidate for this position 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.
#RTP

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.