Mastercard is a global leader in payments technology, empowering economies and individuals across 200+ countries. We are dedicated to building a sustainable economy where everyone can thrive, offering secure, simple, and smart digital payment solutions. Our innovative technology, strategic partnerships, and extensive networks are designed to help people, businesses, and governments achieve their full potential.

This Principal Software Engineering role focuses on Authorization Decisioning, a critical system that processes over a billion transactions daily, providing essential market-facing services including advanced fraud detection. You will be a key technical authority, driving innovation and providing leadership across our program and its technology and product partners. Your role will involve navigating complex organizational structures to collaborate with architects, product managers, analysts, managers, and engineers, collaboratively shaping the future of our evolving platform.

You will be instrumental in experimenting, building, guiding, and mentoring engineering teams to successfully implement solutions in production, ensuring the continuous advancement and robust performance of our financial infrastructure.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will contribute as an individual contributor 20-40% of the time while providing significant technical leadership. You will be recognized as a team's technical expert, driving innovation and organizational growth through your contributions. Your work will involve tackling complex, enterprise-wide initiatives that span multiple services and programs, collaborating closely with business and product owners, engineers, and architects to design and deliver new services and product bundles.

You will articulate architecture patterns of complex systems, detailing business and technical implications for executive and customer stakeholders. This includes analyzing, designing, developing, and delivering software solutions, as well as defining requirements for new applications and customizations, adhering strictly to established standards, processes, and best practices. You will set priorities, drive deliverables within global technology domains, and engage with the broader technical community to anticipate innovation and evaluate new solutions.

Key responsibilities also include making well-informed technical decisions based on partner input and personal experience, taking ownership to see them through to completion. You will practice sustainable incident response, conduct blameless postmortems, and adopt a holistic problem-solving approach during production events. Effectively explaining technical issues and solution strategies to stakeholders, ensuring timely completion of technical designs and delivery milestones, and liaising with stakeholders to understand business needs are paramount.

We are seeking an experienced professional who has built a career designing and developing high-performance, high-transaction volume, and globally scalable platforms. As an individual contributor, you have a proven track record of solving challenging problems. You are passionate about crafting exceptional software while also understanding the importance of collaborating with SRE, Performance Engineering, and Infrastructure teams to ensure optimal architectures and code performance.

You possess a deep understanding of your responsibility for software supporting critical financial infrastructure for multiple nation-states. You extend your ownership to ensure both the SDLC and governance processes are efficient and responsible, recognizing that you cannot be an expert in all areas. Your intelligence and industriousness are evident in your leadership style; you foster an environment where all ideas are heard and respected, and you provide steadfast support to engineers during critical production moments.

Essential proficiencies include deep experience in financial services, particularly within the payments industry, with hands-on experience designing for standard and regulatory compliance (PCI-DSS, GDPR). You have expertise in data-intensive design and architecture patterns, including APIs, event-driven services, batch services, messaging systems, and big data. You are skilled in data-intensive programming languages and technologies such as Java, REST API, Microservices, Kafka, Axon, MQ, and Spring. Experience with Cloud and DevOps architectures like Kubernetes, Docker, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry is required. Proficiency with databases including Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch is necessary, alongside tools such as Eclipse or IntelliJ, Sonar, GIT, Maven, SQL Developer, Jenkins, CI/CD, and Gatling.

An undergraduate degree in Computer Science or a related STEM field with relevant software engineering experience is required. A graduate degree in Computer Science or Business, with experience in fintech and payments, is preferred.