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

Mastercard Overview:
Mastercard is a leading global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to foster an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Through secure data and networks, partnerships, and our passion for innovation, we help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses achieve their highest potential.

Our culture is driven by three core values: Create Value, Move Fast, and Grow Together. These principles guide everything we do both within and outside our company. With a presence in over 210 countries and territories, we are committed to building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless opportunities for all.

Program Overview:
Mastercard Payment Gateway Services offers advanced payment processing and fraud prevention technology to merchants, technology partners, and acquirers across the globe. We are the gateway of choice for Mastercard products. Our unique white-label solution allows acquiring banks to use our gateway technology as their own. Our brand-agnostic technology enables consumers to purchase online goods and services using their preferred payment method.

About the Role:
The Payment Gateway Services team at Mastercard is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to enhance our market-leading products and services. We are modernizing our platform and building additional products and services to empower our customers. This role is ideal for someone passionate about cutting-edge card payment solutions, highly motivated, intellectually curious, analytical, and entrepreneurial.

- Do you enjoy being part of a team that creates and executes strategic initiatives centered around digital payments?
- Do you look forward to developing and engaging with high-performing, diverse teams globally?
- Would you like to be part of a highly visible, strategically important global engineering organization?

Responsibilities:
- Coordinate with a team of senior architects distributed globally.
- Develop junior team members, guiding, coaching, and mentoring them.
- Drive technical excellence across the team.
- Collaborate with Product Management and Product Development to understand business objectives and advise leadership on technical strategy.
- Contribute at least 75% individual technical work, recognized as a team's authority and technical expert, driving innovation and organizational growth.
- Spend the majority of your time writing non-feature code, being hands-on, and collaborating by writing interfaces, tests, and architecture fitness functions.
- Implement, monitor, and maintain compliance and security in CI/CD pipelines, embodying the principle of “Code is Design and Design is Code.”
- Apply domain-driven design, enforcing contextual mappings and aggregates for each bounded context, and drive the implementation of consumer-driven contracts.
- Work on complex enterprise-wide initiatives spanning multiple services/programs and drive resolution.
- Collaborate with business/product owners to architect and deliver new services and products.
- Participate in and contribute to the team’s agile process and decisions, driving prioritization and trade-offs with product partners.
- Drive architectural design, including dependent services, service interactions, and policies.
- Improve the customer experience of services/applications sold as products or bundled services.
- Lead Guild initiatives, engaging and mentoring engineers at all levels to improve software engineering craftsmanship.
- Simplify and improve the cost/benefit of functions/services/architecture strategies.
- Consult across teams and organization lines to identify synergies and reuse opportunities.
- Participate in Principal review architecture meetings and drive resolutions to enterprise-wide challenges and regulatory needs.
- Write recommendations for job promotions based on unbiased views of accomplishments.
- Conduct technical interviews for hiring engineering staff and raising the performance bar.
- Identify and address siloed behaviors within the organization and teams.

Qualifications:
- Demonstrable experience in designing and building high-performance, high-transaction volume, scalable platforms.
- Strong understanding of design patterns, principles, and infrastructural elements – both hardware and software.
- Proven design and development experience in multiple languages (e.g., Java, .NET, JavaScript, SQL), secure coding standards, and vulnerability management.
- Expert understanding and experience with DevOps best practices, guiding developers and abstracting application development from underlying hosting platforms and infrastructure.
- Experience implementing advanced test setups in production environments (e.g., A/B testing, canary releases, blue-green deployment, feature flags).
- Experience with Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) concepts, supporting automation, pipelines, virtualization, and containerization.
- Ability to develop and evangelize reference architecture and run principles to help teams adopt engineering principles from the start.
- Ability to promote and coach teams to take on full-stack development and facilitate end-to-end service ownership.
- Ability to engage engineers across the technology organization to promote standard software patterns and reuse common libraries and services.
- Experience leading and coaching teams in software planning and estimation for large-scale complex programs.
- Ability to drive trade-off discussions to set appropriate development capacity based on value drivers (e.g., regulatory, security, new business, market parity, technical debt).
- Ability to articulate architecture patterns of complex systems, with business and technical implications, to executive and customer stakeholders.
- Ability to define and drive advanced chaos and other operational testing practices to test points of failure, monitors, and system behaviors under adverse conditions (e.g., resource spikes, network congestion, component or infrastructure failure).
- Experience with agile and modern SDLC practices: Scrum/Kanban/Continuous Delivery/DevOps/Quality engineering, and the delivery situations they are used for.

Corporate Security Responsibility:
All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks come with inherent risk to the organization. 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.
- Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.

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.