Senior 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

Senior Principal Software Engineer

Overview:
Mastercard’s AI & Data Platform Engineering team is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to provide technology leadership and strategic influence across enterprise-scale initiatives for the next generation Decision Management Platform. With deep architectural expertise and ability to collaborate across the organization, you will have the ability to drive innovation and engineering excellence.
Key areas of focus include leveraging disruptive technologies in the real time AI inferencing and decisioning domain to improve product effectiveness, increase business agility, increase technical resilience and scalability, and lower cost of ownership.
You will work closely with the technology executive, senior leaders and engineers to play an important pivotal role in shaping the overall AI & DPE technology strategy for the wider AI & DPE team.
This role is open to candidates based at any Mastercard U.S. location, with an expectation of three days per week onsite. Travel is required approximately 20% of the time, including domestic travel within the U.S. and occasional international travel to Dublin, Ireland.

Role:
Enterprise Architecture & Technical Leadership
• Lead architectural design for complex, enterprise-wide initiatives spanning multiple services and programs.
• Define and evolve service interactions, dependency models, and policies to ensure scalability, security, and resilience.
• Partner with business and product leaders to architect and deliver new services that enable innovative products and bundles.
Customer Experience & Platform Strategy
• Own and improve the end-to-end customer experience across a portfolio of services and applications.
• Simplify and optimize architecture strategies to balance cost, performance, and business value.
• Apply judgment and experience to make trade-offs between competing priorities and technical constraints.
Thought Leadership & Influence
• Drive organization-wide initiatives to advance software engineering craftsmanship and best practices.
• Represent the organization through public speaking engagements, technical blogs, and white papers on emerging technologies.
• Participate in Principal-level architecture reviews and resolve enterprise-wide technical and regulatory challenges.
Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing
• Consult across teams and organizational boundaries to identify synergies, reuse opportunities, and eliminate silos.
• Mentor engineers at all levels, fostering technical growth and leadership.
• Promote knowledge sharing within guilds and programs to accelerate innovation and productivity.
Talent & Culture
• Conduct technical interviews to raise the performance bar and attract top talent.
• Champion behaviors that align with organizational values and drive a culture of excellence.

All About You:
• Prior experience in senior technical leadership roles such as Senior Engineer, Lead Engineer, Principal Engineer, or Enterprise Architect within large-scale technology organizations, with a strong focus on platform engineering and enterprise architecture.
• Experience designing and delivering large-scale, cloud-native platforms supporting high availability, scalability, and performance requirements.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, microservices architectures, and event-driven systems.
• Experience building and supporting real-time, data-driven platforms, including AI/ML inferencing and decisioning systems.
• Strong background in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and hybrid architecture environments.
• Experience designing APIs, integration patterns, and enterprise-scale service orchestration solutions.
• Hands-on experience with data platforms, streaming systems, and large-scale data pipelines.
• Exposure to AI/ML platforms, MLOps practices, and model deployment and lifecycle management in enterprise environments.
• Experience defining and driving enterprise architecture standards, governance frameworks, and engineering best practices.
• Strong experience evaluating architecture trade-offs across scalability, performance, cost, and business priorities.
• Strong progr