Principal Software Engineer (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

We connect and power an inclusive digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere. We enable safe, simple, smart, and accessible transactions through secure data, strong networks, partnerships, and innovation.

Our culture is driven by our Decency Quotient (DQ), fostering inclusion, respect, and diversity. We believe that diverse perspectives strengthen decision-making, drive innovation, and deliver better business outcomes.

Overview

Mastercard’s Network & Digital Payments group creates meaningful experiences for consumers while enabling merchants and issuers to engage in ways not possible in the pre-digital world.

The Global Product Engineering team builds foundational payment solutions at scale. This role offers an opportunity to work in a high-impact environment focused on delivering secure, convenient, and controlled digital payment experiences.

We are looking for leaders who:

• Have experience building and scaling global products
• Are passionate about driving a world beyond cash
• Thrive in agile environments with high standards of engineering excellence

Role

In this role, you will drive collaboration across engineering, product management, enterprise functions, and regional business teams. You will also lead by defining the technical strategy, architecture, design, and execution to iteratively achieve outcomes

• Own architecture across APIs, microservices, data, and integration patterns to deliver scalable, resilient, high-performance systems
• Drive end-to-end design and implementation of critical services, staying hands-on in complex and high-risk areas
• Lead key decisions across performance, scalability, reliability, security, and observability
• Balance long-term architecture vision with practical delivery needs, platform stability, and business priorities
• Partner closely with product, engineering, and architects to align roadmaps, transition states, and delivery sequencing
• Provide technical leadership through design reviews, guidance, and hands-on support to engineering teams
• Ensure solutions are cohesive, supportable, and aligned with enterprise standards and governance
• Contribute to architecture governance, reviews, and documentation to drive clarity and execution alignment
• Drive engineering excellence and modern practices (DDD, event-driven design, secure-by-design)
• Lead early-stage initiatives (PoCs, pilots) and accelerate speed to market and platform evolution
• Mentor engineers and emerging architects, strengthening technical capability across teams
• Build strong collaboration across teams to ensure delivery quality, maintainability, and long-term platform health

About You

• Proven experience architecting large-scale, high-performance distributed platforms in complex enterprise environments.

Must be high-energy, detail-oriented and proactive with the ability to function under pressure in an independent environment.

• Strong ability to define solution direction across multiple teams and support engineering through design, build, and delivery.
• Ability to communicate architecture clearly to support alignment, decision-making, and execution.
• Strong partnership skills, with the ability to work closely with product teams to shape solution roadmaps and align architecture with evolving business priorities.
• Confidence in leading decisions, managing trade-offs, and influencing technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to combine strategic thinking with hands-on technical judgment, bringing clarity to ambiguity and helping teams move forward with confidence.

Required Skills

• Strong foundation in distributed systems, API and service design, modern backend architecture, and data-intensive platform design.
• Experience with microservices architecture, domain-driven design, and modern integration patterns.
• Experience with CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes, and modern delivery practices across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.
• Strong understanding of web architecture, application development, integration patterns, and RESTful APIs.
• Experience with relational and operational data technologies, including Oracle and PostgreSQL, and data models that support high-volume transaction processing.
• Ability to define non-functional requirements across resilience, scalability, observability, security, and performance, and ensure these are reflected in solution design.
• Experience supporting modernization, migration, and platform transformation initiatives in environments where continuity of service is critical.

Desirable Knowledge / Experience

• Experience in fraud, decisioning, workflow, or analyst-facing platforms.
• Experience with high-performance data storage technologies such as GemFire and similar in-memory or distributed data platforms.
• Database experience, including Oracle and PostgreSQL, and data models that support high-volume transaction processing and operational workflows.
• Experience with streaming or messaging platforms used to support event-driven and near-real-time architectures.
• Experience integrating vendor and open-source products into an overall platform architecture.
• Experience developing and supporting highly scalable, high-performance transaction processing systems.
• Good working knowledge of cryptography functions and PKI infrastructure.
• Familiarity with architecture governance, risk, assurance, or enterprise review processes.
• Exposure to AI/GenAI or automation opportunities that improve user workflows, platform usability, or operational efficiency.

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.

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.