Lead, Site Reliability 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

The Real Time Payments International team is looking for a Lead, Site Reliability Engineer to drive day-to-day operational stability and support the reliability of critical payment platforms by implementing automation, leverage best practices and work with a high-impact team responsible for driving production readiness, reliability, and DevOps automation across Mastercard platforms.

This role plays a key part in incident management, change readiness, and platform operations, while contributing to continuous improvement initiatives.

The ideal candidate brings strong technical troubleshooting skills, operational discipline, and ownership mindset, with the ability to lead during incidents and collaborate effectively across engineering and program teams.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Operations & Stability

• Support end-to-end availability, monitoring, and performance of critical payment platforms.
• Execute operational processes to ensure platform health and stability.
• Participate in capacity checks, readiness validations, and environment monitoring.

Incident Management & Execution

• Actively manage and coordinate incident triage and resolution.
• Serve as incident commander driving medium to high-severity incidents.
• Ensure timely updates, accurate impact assessment, and appropriate escalation.
• Contribute to root cause analysis with clear identification of actions and ownership.

Change & Release Support

• Participate in highlighting gaps and defining test cases required for a change in lower environments and validate lower environment test completeness.
• Ensure adherence to change governance processes (test case reviews, checklists, approvals, rollback readiness).
• Engage in creating change plans and support execution of production changes, deployments, and validations.

Technical Troubleshooting

• Perform hands-on troubleshooting across:

o Application behaviour and dependencies.

o Infrastructure components (compute, network, storage).

o Database and performance issues.

• Collaborate with engineering, infrastructure and other technical teams to isolate and resolve issues efficiently.

Monitoring & Observability

• Improve system health monitoring using observability tools and alerts.
• Identify gaps in alerting and contribute to improving quality of alerting and dashboards.
• Ensure proactive detection of anomalies using observability tools.

Automation & Process Improvement

• Contribute to automation initiatives to reduce toil and errors.
• Identify repetitive operational tasks and drive improvements.
• Support implementation of DevOps best practices.
• Leverage AI-driven tools to improve monitoring, incident detection, and operational efficiency, enabling faster troubleshooting and reduced manual effort in day-to-day operations.

Stakeholder Coordination

• Work closely with engineering, program teams, and external partners during incidents and changes.
• Provide structured updates to stakeholders with clarity and consistency.
• Ensure alignment during critical activities.

Risk Identification

• Highlight operational and platform risks including test coverage gaps, infrastructure constraints, dependency risks.
• Escalate issues proactively and support mitigation tracking.

Team Contribution & Mentorship

• Support onboarding and guidance of junior team members.
• Contribute to runbooks, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Drive consistency in execution and adherence to operational standards.

Success in This Role Looks Like:

1. Deep Operational Ownership (“Built to Run” Mindset)

A successful Lead SRE Engineer is fully accountable for the operational health of their program, not just responsive to incidents.

• Monitoring, alerting, and dashboards that reflect real customer impact.
• Emergency response and incident leadership, including clear communications and post-incident follow-ups.
• Capacity planning and readiness aligned with product and business growth.
• Change management discipline, ensuring safe, compliant releases.

2.Strong Technical & System-Level Understanding

A Lead SRE Engineer is expected to operate at system dependency level, not just ticket or tool level.

• Have a strong understanding of application business logic and workflows.
• Have a clear grasp of upstream/downstream dependencies.
• Expertise in observability (alerts, dashboards, synthetic monitoring).
• Ability to drive automation to reduce manual toil and recurring issues.
• End to End ownership of tasks and activities.

3. Incident Leadership & Decision-Making Under Pressure

Beyond technical skill, Leads are distinguished by how they lead during high-severity situations.

• Takes command of major incidents, not waiting to be asked.
• Maintains calm, structured communication with engineering, product, and leadership.
• Balances speed vs risk in decision-making.
• Ensures clear ownership of actions, timelines, and follow-ups.
• Drives root cause analysis and systemic fixes, not just recovery.

4. Proactive Risk & Reliability Engineering

A successful Lead SRE prevents incidents more than fight them.

• Identifies systemic risks before they become outages.
• Pushes for design, monitoring, or process improvements.
• Challenges “tribal knowledge” by insisting on documentation and runbooks.
• Drives improvements aligned with operational maturity models.

5. Leadership Without Formal Authority

Lead SRE Engineers often lead without being people managers, which requires strong influence skills.

• Mentors and coaches senior and mid-level SRE’s.
• Sets the technical and behavioral bar for the team.
• Gives clear, constructive feedback.
• Acts as a role model for ownership, urgency, and professionalism.
• Builds trust with Engineering, Product, and Platform teams.
• Flexible in terms of working hours where needed.

6. Excellent Cross-Functional Communication

SRE Leads sit at the intersection of technology, operations, and business.

• Translating technical issues into business impact to communicate clearly with senior stakeholders during incidents.
• Setting expectations early and transparently with junior team members.
• Represents SRE confidently in planning, reviews, and retrospectives,
• Ensuring post-incident learnings are shared and acted upon.

All About You:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

8+ years experience in production support, SRE, or BizOps roles.

Exposure to managing incidents and supporting distributed systems.

Experience in payments ecosystem will be preferred.

Knowledge of monitoring and alerting tools like Splunk , Dynatrace , Blaze meter.

Knowledge of automation and DevOps practices.

Experience working in cross-functional and high-pressure environments.

Ability to organize, multi-task and prioritise work based on current business needs.

Possesses strong verbal and written communication skills.

Strong relationship skills, collaborative skills and stakeholder management skills.

Experience in one or more of the following is preferred: C, C++, Java, Python, Go, Perl or Ruby.

Interest in designing, analysing and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems.

Ability to work with little or no supervision.

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.