Principal Engineer, Real-time Payments (Technology & Architecture)

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

Overview

The Real time Payments (RTP) program is driving the global shift toward instant, account to account payments, enabling secure, low latency, and highly resilient payment services across multiple live markets worldwide.

RTP platforms operate as mission critical financial infrastructure, supporting high transaction volumes, strict regulatory expectations, and near zero downtime requirements. The program spans multiple products and shared services, deployed across diverse market and customer environments, while adhering to Mastercard’s enterprise architecture, security, and operational standards.

Engineering within RTP is focused not only on feature delivery, but on building scalable, resilient platforms that can evolve safely over time-through strong architecture, disciplined engineering practices, and a relentless focus on non functional excellence.

Role

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to provide hands on technical execution and architecture & technology leadership for multiple Real-time Payments products and platform capabilities across multiple markets.

This is a senior individual contributor role for a deeply experienced engineer who:

• Owns the design and implementation of complex services or subsystems
• Stays close to the code on complex and high risk areas
• Is deeply hands-on and leads by technical design & architecture excellence
• Contributes & drives architecture and product design aspects
• Owns key technology & implementation decisions including all non-functional aspects across performance, scalability, reliability, security, and observability

The role combines strong technical depth with engineering leadership with end-to-end ownership for delivery quality, correctness, and maintainability in their area of responsibility.

Key Responsibilities

The role spans five core dimensions, with ownership across end to end technical outcomes.

1. Design & Technical Execution

• Own the architecture and detailed design for one or more RTP products or platform capabilities across markets.
• Define and enforce reference architectures, design patterns, and engineering standards (e.g., microservices, event driven architecture, domain driven design).
• Design, build, and maintain high-quality software components and services for RTP products.
• Lead and participate in technical design reviews, ensuring alignment with RTP and enterprise architecture principles.
• Make clear, well reasoned technology and design trade offs, balancing delivery speed, risk, and long term maintainability.
• Own end-to-end delivery of complex features or subsystems, from design through production.
• Translate functional and non-functional requirements into robust technical implementations.
• Ensure solutions adhere to RTP architecture standards and engineering best practices.

2. Hands-on Engineering & Code Quality

• Remain hands on for critical components, complex problem areas, prototypes, and reference implementations.
• Lead by example in code quality, testing discipline, and maintainable design.
• Perform and participate in code reviews, raising the bar for engineering quality.
• Drive high quality implementations for low latency, high throughput, distributed systems.
• Support teams in solving deep technical problems across application, messaging, data, and platform layers.

3. Non Functional Excellence (NFR Ownership)

• Design and implement solutions that meet defined performance, scalability, reliability, and security requirements.
• Define and enforce measurable non functional requirements, SLIs, and SLOs.
• Ensure production readiness through strong observability (metrics, logs, traces), capacity planning, and failure mode design.
• Proactively identify and remediate architectural, capacity, and resilience risks.
• Support performance testing, capacity validation, and production readiness activities.
• Actively participate in incident analysis and remediation when issues arise.

4. Cross Market Consistency & Platform Evolution

• Drive cross market alignment, preventing architectural and Technology drift and duplicated solutions.
• Promote reuse of patterns, components, and learnings across RTP markets and shared services.
• Contribute to and influence the technology roadmap, including platform evergreening and technical debt reduction.
• Act as a trusted technical partner to product, operations, and governance forums.

5. Engineering Leadership & Bar Raising

• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads; raise the quality of design reviews, code reviews, and technical decision making.
• Influence engineering culture toward ownership, quality, and operational excellence.
• Support hiring and technical assessments, helping set the bar for senior technical talent.
• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non technical stakeholders.

All About You

Experience & Technical Expertise

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant time spent designing and building distributed systems at scale.
• Proven experience owning architecture and design for complex, business critical platforms.
• Strong hands on expertise with microservices and event driven architectures.
• Deep understanding of performance engineering, scalability patterns, resilience design, and failure handling.
• Solid experience with observability, production diagnostics, and operational readiness.

Technology Breadth

• Strong background in enterprise backend development with hands-on experience across object-oriented & functional programming languages - Java/Spring, React, Angular, Erlang
• Experience working across multiple technology stacks and system layers (application, messaging, data, platform).
• Familiarity with cloud and containerized environments; ability to operate effectively across heterogeneous market deployments.
• Payments or financial services experience (e.g., real time processing, regulated environments) is a strong plus.

Leadership & Ways of Working

• Demonstrated ability to influence without authority and lead through technical credibility.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and making high impact technical decisions.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex concepts clearly.

• A mindset focused on long term platform health, not just short term delivery.

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.