Lead Software Development Engineer

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Title and Summary

Lead Software Development Engineer

Lead Software Development Engineer, BE&O

Job Description Summary
Position Overview

The Business Experimentation and Optimization (BE&O) teams within Mastercard’s Services organization are building industry-leading software that empowers business users around the world to make data-driven decisions through advanced analytics and experimentation. As we expand our product offerings and modernize our technology stack, we are reimagining how we deliver scalable, cloud-native solutions to our clients.

We are seeking a hands-on, technically strong Lead Software Engineer to drive the architecture, design, and development of our next-generation experimentation platform. In this role, you will help define and evolve system architecture and non-functional requirements—such as scalability, performance, security, and reliability—ensuring our solutions meet the highest engineering standards. As a technical leader, you will guide cross-functional teams in building scalable services, APIs, and analytical capabilities that power our platform, leveraging technologies like Databricks and cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure. You will collaborate closely with your immediate team and partner with other development teams across programs to align on shared goals, define cross-cutting initiatives, and deliver cohesive, enterprise-grade solutions. You will also mentor engineers, work across global time zones, and champion engineering excellence through best practices in software development, observability, and continuous delivery.

Our teams are small, agile, and empowered to choose the processes that work best for their goals. Every engineer contributes to the full development lifecycle—from ideation and design to implementation and testing—fostering a culture of ownership, innovation, and continuous improvement.

Who is Mastercard?
Mastercard is the global technology company behind the world’s fastest payments processing network. We are a vehicle for commerce, a connection to financial systems for the previously excluded, and a technology innovation lab. We ensure every employee has the opportunity to be a part of something bigger and to change lives. We believe as our company grows, so should you.

Position Responsibilities:
At Mastercard Services, you will lead the development of cutting-edge, analytics-driven products that help businesses worldwide seize the most value from their data. As a Lead Software Development Engineer, you will:

Build advanced, cloud-native services and modern frameworks, enabling some of the world’s largest organizations to make critical and data-driven decisions.
Lead the development of scalable, high-performance applications by pushing the boundaries of our data analytics capabilities and implementing robust services and APIs on AWS or Azure cloud infrastructure.
Drive the technical vision and roadmap for a suite of web-based data and analytics applications, integrating new technologies and modern architectural approaches to continuously enhance product capabilities and support client decision-making. This will be done in close partnership with other lead engineers across the organization to ensure alignment, scalability, and long-term platform evolution.

Serve as the team’s technical leader, making key architecture and design decisions, conducting design/code reviews, and ensuring best engineering practices (clean code, testing, security, performance) for high-quality software development.
Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams and coordinate development efforts across global teams in different time zones, demonstrating outstanding communication and teamwork skills to deliver features effectively in a fast-paced environment.
Architect, modernize, and optimize our systems to handle rapidly growing data volumes and user bases, leveraging a service architecture and cloud scalability (AWS/Azure) to ensure robust, reliable performance as we scale globally.
Mentor and guide other engineers, providing technical mentorship and fostering a culture of innovation, continuous learning, and technical excellence across the team.
Ideal Candidate Qualifications:

8+ years of extensive software engineering experience in an agile environment, with a strong track record of building high-performance, large-scale applications and full-stack systems.

Hands-on experience developing microservices and RESTful APIs, as well as working with relational databases and distributed data stores.

Experience in cloud technologies (AWS and/or Azure) and modern deployment practices, including containerization (e.g., Docker) and orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), to build and manage scalable, distributed applications.

Strong experience with big data and analytics tools, particularly Databricks and Spark (or PySpark), for building data pipelines and executing large-scale data transformations.

Demonstrated ability to build deep domain knowledge and effectively partner with Product Management to translate functional requirements into non-functional requirements and scalable technical designs.

Experience incorporating Generative AI (GenAI) into software products and/or the software development lifecycle, including use cases such as intelligent automation, code generation, or AI-enhanced user experiences.

Proven technical leadership experience, including leading engineering teams or complex cross-functional projects, making architecture-level decisions, and mentoring engineers to deliver technically excellent solutions.

Hands-on experience with technology modernization initiatives—such as migrating legacy monolithic systems to modern microservice architectures—to improve scalability, flexibility, and maintainability.

Ability to navigate ambiguity, define a clear technical strategy, and drive alignment across teams to move initiatives forward in uncertain or evolving contexts.

Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with experience working across cross-functional teams and coordinating with globally distributed teams in multiple time zones.

Self-motivated, creative, and analytical mindset, with the ability to work independently, take initiative, and thrive in a fast-paced, innovative environment.

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field (advanced degree a plus), with a strong foundation in computer science fundamentals and software engineering best practices.

Mastercard is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity and inclusion. Applicants will be considered and treated without regard to gender, gender identity, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, veteran or disabled status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices;

• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;

• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and

• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.