Senior Software Engineer

Location: Dublin, Ireland

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

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

Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer – Performance Engineering
Who is Mastercard?
Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential.
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Overview
We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Software Engineer with strong Performance Engineering expertise to join our engineering organization. This role is responsible for designing, developing, testing, and operating highly scalable, resilient, and high-performing payment platforms and services. The ideal candidate combines deep software engineering knowledge with a passion for performance, observability, capacity planning, reliability, and continuous improvement.
You will partner with software engineers, architects, product teams, reliability engineers, and operations teams to ensure that performance, scalability, and operational excellence are built into solutions from design through production.
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Key Responsibilities
Software Engineering
• Design, develop, test, and maintain high-quality software services, APIs, and distributed systems.
• Participate in architecture, design reviews, and technical decision-making.
• Build resilient, secure, scalable, and cloud-native applications.
• Contribute throughout the SDLC, including design, coding, testing, deployment, and production support.
• Drive automation across development, testing, monitoring, and deployment processes.
• Perform code reviews and mentor junior engineers on engineering best practices.
• Troubleshoot complex application, platform, and production issues.
• Champion engineering excellence, operational readiness, and modern software practices.
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Performance Engineering
• Define and drive Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), including latency, throughput, scalability, availability, and capacity goals.
• Partner with architects and development teams to evaluate design choices and identify performance risks early in the development lifecycle.
• Develop and execute comprehensive performance engineering strategies.
• Design, build, and maintain performance test automation frameworks.
• Conduct component, integration, end-to-end, and production-readiness performance assessments.
• Analyze application, JVM, database, container, network, and infrastructure performance characteristics.
• Perform root-cause analysis of bottlenecks across distributed systems.
• Define KPIs, SLAs, SLOs, and performance acceptance criteria.
• Drive capacity planning and growth forecasting activities.
• Use telemetry, monitoring, and observability data to improve performance and reliability.
• Produce executive-level performance reports and recommendations.
• Establish performance engineering best practices and standards across teams.

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Technical Skills
Required
• Strong software engineering experience developing enterprise-grade systems.
• Expertise in Java, Golang, or other modern backend programming languages.
• Experience building distributed systems and microservice architectures.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native technologies and container platforms.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing.
• Solid understanding of databases, messaging systems, APIs, and event-driven architectures.
• Knowledge of Linux operating systems and troubleshooting techniques.
• Experience with observability platforms and monitoring tools.
• Expertise in application and system performance tuning.
• Experience conducting performance testing and workload modelling.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
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Performance Engineering Expertise
• LoadRunner, JMeter or similar tools.
• Dynatrace, Splunk or similar.
• Capacity planning and workload forecasting.
• JVM tuning and profiling.
• Thread, memory, CPU, and I/O analysis.
• Database performance optimization.
• Network and cloud performance analysis.
• Performance test framework development and automation.
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Qualifications
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• 3+ years focused on performance engineering, scalability, or site reliability.
• Experience supporting mission-critical, high-volume transactional systems.
• Experience working in Agile and DevOps environments.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and stakeholder management skills.

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.