Mastercard is a leading global technology company within the payments industry, dedicated to powering economies and empowering individuals across over 200 countries and territories. Our core mission is to foster an inclusive digital economy by making transactions secure, simple, smart, and accessible for everyone. We leverage advanced technology, robust networks, and strategic partnerships to deliver innovative products and services that enable individuals, businesses, and governments to achieve their full potential. Our commitment to a strong decency quotient (DQ) shapes our culture and guides all our endeavors, as we build a sustainable world filled with priceless possibilities.

Payments Network Technology is actively seeking a Principal Engineer to serve as an Application Architect. This pivotal role will provide essential technical and delivery leadership for critical payment-network initiatives. The position involves seamlessly integrating architecture definition, release coordination, dependency management, and engineering execution across multiple dynamic teams.

As a Principal Engineer – Application Architect, you will be instrumental in defining and refining the architecture for our payment-network services, ensuring they are secure, scalable, and highly available. You will orchestrate technical delivery across various teams, managing releases, dependencies, defect triage, and the resolution of complex cross-cutting issues.

Collaborate closely with product and engineering leaders to translate intricate business needs into actionable architectural blueprints and implementation strategies. Lead design reviews and champion crucial decisions regarding APIs, service interactions, data management, system resiliency, security protocols, and overall operational readiness. Proactively identify opportunities for reuse and champion the adoption of common engineering patterns and standards across the organization. Mentor and guide engineers and technical leads, fostering a culture of technical excellence. Effectively communicate architecture trade-offs, potential delivery risks, and strategic recommendations to senior stakeholders. Drive technical or product leadership initiatives, offering mentorship to team members and guiding decisions across multiple workstreams.

We are looking for extensive software architecture and development experience, particularly within large-scale systems. A deep understanding of Java, Spring Boot, microservices, REST APIs, messaging systems, event-driven architecture, SQL/NoSQL databases, and cloud-native platforms is essential. Proficiency in secure engineering practices, DevOps methodologies, performance optimization, system resiliency, observability, and production-readiness is required.

Demonstrated ability to lead through influence across organizational boundaries is key. Candidates should possess a Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience. Experience working within Agile delivery environments and across the full software development lifecycle is expected. Possess exceptional communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and stakeholder-management skills. The ability to collaborate effectively with globally distributed product, engineering, architecture, operations, and business teams is crucial.

Proven experience leading SOAR (Solution Architecture Review) processes and driving technical strategy, architecture alignment, engineering excellence, and risk management across multiple teams. Expertise in creating and reviewing TADs (Technical Architecture Documents) for large-scale distributed systems, ensuring adherence to enterprise standards, security requirements, resiliency objectives, and long-term maintainability. Demonstrated success in defining and governing cross-platform architecture to enable interoperability, reuse, standardization, and consistent engineering practices across diverse products and services.

Experience in designing and implementing multi-region resiliency architectures, including active-active and active-passive deployment patterns, robust disaster recovery strategies, efficient cross-region data replication, reliable failover mechanisms, and comprehensive business continuity solutions. A strong grasp of distributed data management, including data replication, various consistency models, recovery objectives, and operational considerations across geographic regions. Champion operability and maintainability as fundamental design principles, ensuring observability, monitoring, automation, self-healing capabilities, robust supportability, and simplified operational management are integrated from the outset.

Possess a deep understanding of Mastercard Engineering Principles (or equivalent large-scale enterprise engineering standards) and a proven capacity to apply them consistently across architecture, software design, deployment, resiliency, security, and operational practices. Demonstrated ability to adeptly balance architectural considerations, business priorities, scalability, security, resiliency, and operational needs while setting technology direction for multiple engineering teams. Experience defining architecture guardrails, engineering standards, reference implementations, and reusable patterns that enhance consistency, quality, and delivery effectiveness throughout the organization. Strong knowledge of reliability engineering practices, including service-level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, observability, fault isolation, disaster recovery testing, and continuous resilience validation.