Mastercard is a global leader in technology and payments, dedicated to connecting and powering an inclusive digital economy. We create secure, simple, and accessible transactions, enabling individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses to reach their full potential. Our commitment to a strong decency quotient drives our culture and operations across over 210 countries and territories, building a sustainable world with priceless possibilities.

As a Lead Cloud Infrastructure Architect/Engineer, you will be instrumental in designing, building, and managing the core platforms that support our product and service delivery. This role is centered on Azure-based infrastructure, leveraging cloud-native services and automation to enhance transaction processing, analytics, and developer productivity across the enterprise. You will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our cloud infrastructure.

You will provide essential technical leadership for multifaceted cloud infrastructure and platform projects, impacting multiple teams and services. Your responsibilities include owning the architecture, design, and implementation of critical Azure components and platform capabilities. You will be responsible for defining and evolving standards, patterns, and guardrails to ensure secure, scalable, and operable cloud solutions. Additionally, you will lead cross-team discussions to achieve consensus on design decisions and tradeoffs, enhance self-service provisioning and developer platforms to foster team autonomy, and proactively identify and mitigate systemic risks.

Guiding and mentoring senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews and technical coaching will be a key aspect of your role. You will collaborate closely with product, security, operations, and architecture stakeholders to translate business needs into robust platform solutions. A crucial part of your contribution involves championing operability and cost efficiency as fundamental design principles, embedding observability, auditing, and financial transparency into all platform solutions. Advanced troubleshooting skills are essential for resolving complex, cross-system production issues with minimal oversight.

We are seeking candidates with 8-12 years of comprehensive experience in a relevant field. Essential to this role is extensive hands-on expertise in designing, building, and operating Azure cloud infrastructure at scale, covering compute, networking, storage, identity, and platform services. A deep understanding of Infrastructure-as-Code tools like ARM, Bicep, or Terraform, with a focus on modularity and reuse, is paramount. Strong command of cloud security and networking concepts, including IAM, private networking, and defense-in-depth architectures, is required.

Demonstrated experience in designing resilient, highly available, and fault-tolerant platforms, along with a solid grasp of failure modes and disaster recovery strategies, is crucial. You should possess a proven ability to lead complex initiatives from inception to completion, including technical design, work decomposition, delivery sequencing, and managing safe production rollouts. Experience with enterprise CI/CD and SDLC practices, including quality gates and change management, is highly valued. Excellent communication skills are necessary for documenting architectures, setting technical direction, and fostering consensus across diverse teams. A consistent track record of mentoring engineers and raising technical quality is expected, alongside a pragmatic and collaborative leadership approach that balances technical excellence with delivery needs.