Mastercard is a global leader, driving economies and empowering individuals across over 200 countries and territories. We are dedicated to fostering a sustainable economy where prosperity is accessible to all. Our commitment to innovation in digital payments ensures transactions are secure, simple, smart, and readily available. By integrating cutting-edge technology, strategic partnerships, and extensive networks, we deliver unparalleled products and services designed to help people, businesses, and governments achieve their fullest potential.

As a Principal Software Engineer on the Authorization Decisioning team, you will be instrumental in delivering over 20 market-facing services, including industry-leading fraud detection, at a global scale. Our platforms are the backbone of critical financial infrastructure worldwide, processing billions of transactions daily using advanced computational intelligence.

This role is for a technical authority and visionary. You will provide extensive technical leadership across engineering, architecture, product, and operations. Your influence will shape the continuous evolution of a highly available, high throughput, and globally distributed platform. You will be hands-on, actively experimenting, building, mentoring, and guiding teams through the entire lifecycle from ideation to production and ongoing operation. This position uniquely combines deep technical contributions with significant organizational leadership, focusing on enhancing architectural clarity, driving engineering excellence, and ensuring long-term platform resilience.

Your role will involve 20-40% hands-on individual contribution, with the remaining time dedicated to technical leadership, architectural guidance, and fostering organizational impact. You will be recognized as a key technical expert and thought leader, influencing both your immediate domain and broader teams.

Key responsibilities include driving innovation, ensuring architectural coherence, and establishing engineering standards across multiple services and programs. You will adeptly navigate organizational boundaries, collaborating closely with product management, architecture, infrastructure, security, and leadership teams.

You will lead the analysis, design, development, and deployment of intricate, enterprise-scale software solutions. This includes architecting and evolving distributed systems, focusing on service interactions, data flows, resiliency patterns, and operational policies. You will define and champion reference architectures, design patterns, and operational principles such as active/active/active, self-healing systems, and auto-scaling mechanisms.

Furthermore, you will spearhead architectural decisions that strategically balance performance, scalability, security, regulatory compliance, cost-effectiveness, and time-to-market. Your involvement in Principal-level architecture reviews will be crucial for resolving complex technical and regulatory challenges impacting the entire enterprise.

Collaborate effectively with business and product stakeholders to conceptualize and deliver new services, products, and integrated offerings. You will assume end-to-end ownership of the customer experience across a portfolio of services or platforms. Proactively identify opportunities for synergy and code reuse across different teams to minimize redundancy and enhance overall consistency. Strive to simplify existing architectures and optimize cost-benefit trade-offs across diverse systems and platforms.

Provide mentorship and coaching to engineers at all career stages, and lead initiatives to elevate engineering craftsmanship throughout the organization. Offer consultative support across teams to guide planning, estimation, and execution for large-scale, complex projects. Drive data-informed trade-off discussions to strategically align development resources with critical business objectives, encompassing regulatory requirements, security enhancements, growth opportunities, and technical debt reduction.

Conduct technical interviews to maintain and elevate the engineering talent bar. Author promotion recommendations based on objective assessments of individual impact and achieved outcomes. Represent the organization through presentations at internal and external forums, white papers, and technical blog posts. Actively identify and dismantle siloed behaviors, fostering a culture of collaboration and shared accountability.

We are seeking an individual who has built a career designing and deploying high-performance, high-transaction volume, globally scalable platforms. You are recognized for your ability to tackle and solve complex, ambiguous problems, and now excel at empowering teams to address challenges that transcend individual capabilities.

Your profile includes a blend of deep technical expertise and strong, sound judgment, recognizing that exceptional software is a foundational requirement but not the sole determinant of success. You lead by example, fostering inclusivity during ideation, demonstrating decisiveness during execution, and remaining present and engaged during critical production incidents.

You possess a profound understanding of the responsibilities associated with operating critical financial infrastructure, designing systems with resilience, security, and compliance as paramount considerations. Your influence is earned not through assertion, but through the consistent delivery of clarity, trust, and tangible results.

Key technical proficiencies include expertise in enterprise-grade system design, distributed systems, and advanced design patterns. Experience with event-driven and data-intensive architectures, utilizing technologies like Kafka, NATS, MQ, and hybrid batch/streaming approaches, is essential. You should have deep knowledge of real-time and batch processing, including concepts like checkpointing, idempotency, windowing, and schema evolution. Proficiency in in-memory distributed caching solutions, such as Apache Ignite, including data grids, affinity mapping, persistence, eviction, and consistency models, is highly valued.

For development and platforms, strong hands-on experience with Java, microservices, REST/gRPC, Spring, and the Axon Framework is required. Experience with Go, HTTP/2, streaming technologies, and cloud-native architectures is also desirable. A solid understanding of secure coding standards and vulnerability management (OWASP, CWE, SEI CERT) is critical.

In cloud, DevOps, and data, you should be familiar with cloud and DevOps platforms like Kubernetes, Docker, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Experience with CI/CD and automation tools including Jenkins, Git, Maven, Sonar, and Gatling is expected. Knowledge of databases and data stores such as Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch is necessary. The ability to perform architecture and cost analysis across on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud environments is also important.

An educational background including a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or another STEM-intensive discipline with relevant software engineering experience is required. A Master’s degree in Computer Science or Business, with prior experience in fintech or payments, is preferred. All personnel are responsible for upholding Mastercard's security policies and practices, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of information, reporting security violations, and completing mandatory security training.