Senior Service Management 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

Mastercard is seeking a Service Management Engineer to help ensure the stability, resilience, and operational excellence of critical payment, clearing, data, and platform services. This role operates at the intersection of technology, operations, risk, change, incident management, and customer engagement, helping teams deliver reliable services while continuously improving production readiness and customer experience.

The Service Management Engineer acts as a production readiness steward and service owner, partnering with product, engineering, operations, risk, and customer-facing teams to proactively manage service health, operational risk, change readiness, incident response, problem resolution, certificate lifecycle management, and continual service improvement across complex, distributed environments.

Role Purpose

• Ensure supported platforms and services are stable, resilient, compliant, and ready for production use.
• Drive operational excellence by embedding service management, ITSM, risk, resiliency, automation, monitoring, and change governance practices across the service lifecycle.
• Act as a bridge between product, engineering, operations, customer support, risk, and customer stakeholders to align customer priorities with operational needs.
• Promote developer-run ownership and help engineering teams design, build, and operate fault-tolerant, scalable, and supportable services.

Key Responsibilities

• Service Ownership and Production Readiness: Maintain strong technical and operational knowledge of supported services, ensure readiness before go-live, and drive adoption of operational standards for reliability, scalability, monitoring, capacity, and supportability.
• Incident and Problem Management: Lead or support triage, escalation, root cause analysis, post-incident reviews, and long-term corrective actions. Identify incident trends, ask the right questions to uncover true root cause, and drive improvements that reduce recurrence and improve service stability.
• Change and Release Governance: Review service changes for readiness, impact, risk, timing, customer communication, and execution quality. Partner with engineering, delivery, and product teams to ensure changes are properly assessed, approved, tested, communicated, and executed with minimal customer impact.
• Certificate Lifecycle Management: Act as a key contact for certificate renewal detection, tracking, consultation, automation assessment, and timely remediation to prevent certificate-related service disruption.
• Risk, Controls, and Compliance: Partner with program teams and risk stakeholders to ensure operational, security, and compliance standards are followed. Maintain visibility of service risks, mitigation plans, control gaps, and remediation progress.
• Service Performance and Continuous Improvement: Monitor service health, KPIs, SLAs, ticket trends, customer feedback, and recurring operational pain points. Translate insights into service improvement plans that strengthen resilience and customer experience.
• Stakeholder and Customer Engagement: Build trusted relationships with internal and external stakeholders, communicate clearly during critical events, manage escalations, and represent customer priorities to backend engineering and operations teams.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work across geographically distributed teams, influence without direct authority, and provide operational context to engineers, architects, product owners, support teams, and leadership.

All About You

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 6-8+ years of experience in IT service management, production support, site reliability engineering, business operations, technology service management, or a related role.
• Strong understanding of ITSM lifecycle practices, including incident, problem, change, release, service readiness, risk, and continual improvement. ITIL certification is preferred.
• Experience working in mission-critical production environments with high availability, customer impact sensitivity, and strong operational governance expectations.
• Proven ability to lead incident response, root cause analysis, post-incident reviews, service improvement discussions, and customer or leadership communications during critical events.
• Ability to analyze ticket trends, service metrics, monitoring alerts, risks, and operational data to identify patterns and drive measurable improvements.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to working-level, senior-level, and customer audiences.
• Comfortable working across matrixed, diverse, and geographically distributed teams, with the ability to influence outcomes without direct authority.
• Systematic problem-solving mindset, strong sense of ownership, and ability to balance urgent restoration with long-term service health.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience with clearing, payments, real-time transaction processing, managed services, or regulated financial technology environments.
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Splunk, Dynatrace, or similar platforms.
• Mainframe experience is preferred.
• Experience with cryptography, certificate lifecycle management, renewal automation, and related security controls.
• Working knowledge of relational databases such as Oracle or PostgreSQL, including SQL, PL/SQL, query analysis, and performance considerations.
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools and engineering practices, including Git or Bitbucket, Jenkins, Maven, Artifactory, Groovy, Chef, and automated deployment pipelines.
• Interest in automation, operational tooling, resiliency engineering, capacity planning, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems.

• Pragmatic, detail-oriented, and growth-minded approach, with flexibility to support critical changes, escalations, and time-zone aligned operational needs when required.

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.