Principal Software 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

Principal Software Engineer

Overview
In the time between when you swipe your Mastercard and you receive the approval, Authorization Decisioning has provided your transaction with more than 35 different market-facing services—including industry leading fraud detection. Everyday Authorization Decisioning provides these same robust computational intelligence services to more than a billion transactions around the planet.

Role Overview
As a Principal Software Engineer for Authorization Decisioning, you will provide both technical and strategic leadership. You will play a key role in driving architectural direction and making technical decisions across the program, collaborating closely with our technology and product partners.
You are a way finder. You are working across organizational lines to partner with architects, product managers, analysts, managers, and engineers to collaboratively and creatively find solutions to evolving our growing platform. You are an enabler. You are hands-on experimenting, building, creating, guiding, and mentoring engineering teams through to seeing the realization of these solutions into production.

Role Responsibilities:
• Between 20-40% individual contributor with technical team leadership. Who is recognised as a team/s authority and technical expert within a discipline and drives innovation and organisational growth through their contributions.
• Work on complex enterprise-wide initiatives spanning multiple services/programs and drives resolution by collaborating with business/product owners, engineers, and architects to design and deliver on new services to introduce new products
• Has skills to succinctly articulate architecture patterns of complex systems, with business and technical implications, to executive and customer stakeholders
• Own and drive technology roadmaps aligned to departmental strategy and long term business vision for Authorisation Decisioning.
• Set priorities, objectives, and drive deliverables within global technology domains and sub-domains and engage with the broader technical community to anticipate developments in innovation and evaluate new solutions for future business platform system requirements.
• Leverages input of partners and personal experience to make thoughtful decisions on technical direction and then has the ownership to see those decisions through
• Practice sustainable incident response and conduct blameless postmortems, taking a holistic approach to problem-solving during production events.
• Explain technical issues and solution strategies to stakeholders, ensure timely accomplishment of technical designs and delivery milestones and liaise with stakeholders to understand business needs.

All About You
• You’ve made your career in designing and building high performance, high transaction volume, and globally scalable platforms.
• As an individual contributor you made your name by solving the hard problems that no one else could and as your career grew so did the complexity.
• Designing and building exceptional software may be one of your greatest strengths, but you understand it’s only part of the broader challenge. You actively collaborate with SRE, Performance Engineering, and Infrastructure teams to ensure architectures are sound, properly tuned, and that your teams’ code is optimized for each environment
•You lead by example—your intelligence and work ethic are evident. From early ideation, where you ensure everyone’s ideas are heard and respected, to production crises, where you stay alongside the engineers to resolve last‑minute issues, your leadership is consistently visible. The culture you embody becomes the culture the team follows.

Qualifications:
• Extensive experience in software engineering, including secure solution delivery in complex, globally distributed environments.
• Deep understanding of software engineering concepts, methodologies, and modern delivery practices.
• Experience working with real time, scalable, cloud native systems and CI/CD practices.
• Data-intensive designing and architecture patterns – APIs, event-driven-services, batch-services, messaging systems, and big data.
• Strong analytical skills with experience developing metrics, dashboards, and executive reporting.
• Data-intensive programming – Java, gRPC, REST API, Microservices, Kafka, MQ, and Spring.
• Cloud and DevOps Architecture – Kubernetes, Docker, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry
• Databases – Oracle, Apache Druid, In-memory distributed data grid, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, ElasticSearch
• Tools – Eclipse or IntelliJ, Sonar, GIT, Maven, SQL Developer, Jenkins, CI/CD, Gatling
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence without authority.

Education
• Preferred Bachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering with related experience in fintech and payments.

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.