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

All About You

You are a top talent, result-oriented leader that is passionate about joining a like-minded team at Mastercard AI & Decision Product Enablement (DPE). You thrive on solving complex engineering challenges at scale and have experience building high-speed streaming platforms or distributed systems at hyper-scaler-level performance, AI&DPE is where you can make an outsized impact.

• You want to be part of the team leading innovation at Mastercard and across the globe: Join us and be at the forefront of defining the next generation of our decision platform, handling billions of transactions daily, with stringent reliability and security requirements and 99.999% availability.
• You want to make an impact at hyper scale: Build systems that protect and enable customers across a global network, with reliability and performance at enterprise scale.
• You are experienced at streaming first architecture: Help evolve our high throughput, low latency data streams and decisioning pipelines as we advance Axon based streaming across the platform.
• Your resume and experience shows a track-record of real, proven outcomes for real users: Ship capabilities that drive smarter, faster decisions—from real-time authorization to AI driven enrichment—powering both internal and market facing products.
• You are a leader and will be part of growing and fostering our engineering excellence culture: Define opinionated frameworks, rigorous resiliency, and a builder mindset, supported by transparent roadmaps and product council governance.
• You thrive in a collaborative culture: Collaborate with world-class engineers and data scientists to deploy AI models through fully automated pipelines, accelerate model ops, and pioneer agentic AI capabilities.
 


Role Overview
As the Principal Engineer in the AI & Data Platform Engineering organization, you will 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.

Key Responsibilities
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 techn