Join Mastercard as a Principal Engineer in Real-time Payments, where you'll drive the global shift towards instant, account-to-account payments. This is a critical role in building secure, low-latency, and highly resilient payment services across multiple live markets. You will be instrumental in evolving mission-critical financial infrastructure that supports high transaction volumes and stringent regulatory expectations.

Our Engineering team focuses on creating scalable, resilient platforms for the future. We emphasize strong architecture, disciplined practices, and a commitment to non-functional excellence. This position offers a unique opportunity to shape the technology and architecture of cutting-edge payment solutions.

As a Principal Engineer, you will provide hands-on technical execution and architectural leadership for Real-time Payments products and platform capabilities. Your responsibilities include owning the design and implementation of complex services, staying close to the code in critical areas, and leading by technical design excellence. You will contribute to architecture and product design, making key technology and implementation decisions for performance, scalability, reliability, security, and observability.

You'll also be responsible for translating requirements into robust technical solutions, ensuring adherence to architecture standards, and leading by example in code quality and testing. A significant part of this role involves driving cross-market consistency, influencing the technology roadmap, mentoring senior engineers, and fostering a culture of ownership and operational excellence.

We are seeking a deeply experienced engineer with 10+ years in software engineering, specializing in designing and building distributed systems at scale. Proven experience owning architecture and design for complex, business-critical platforms is essential.

Key technical expertise includes strong hands-on experience with microservices and event-driven architectures, a deep understanding of performance engineering, scalability patterns, resilience design, and failure handling. Familiarity with observability, production diagnostics, and operational readiness is also crucial.

Proficiency across multiple technology stacks and system layers, including enterprise backend development with languages like Java/Spring, React, Angular, and Erlang, is expected. Experience with cloud and containerized environments, along with a background in payments or financial services, is a strong advantage. Demonstrated leadership ability and excellent communication skills are vital for influencing stakeholders and driving technical decisions.