Lead Software Engineer (Backend / Platform – Agentic AI) at Mastercard

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

Lead Software Engineer (Backend / Platform – Agentic AI)

Overview:

Who We Are — Mastercard
Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry, operating in over 210+ countries and territories. Our mission is to power an inclusive, sustainable, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere — by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible.
We harness secure data, world class networks, deep partnerships, and relentless innovation to help individuals, financial institutions, businesses, and governments reach their greatest potential.
Our culture is guided by our Decency Quotient (DQ) — a core value that influences every decision we make and how we treat all who rely on us.

About AI & Decision Product Enablement (AI&DPE)
AI & Decision Product Enablement (AI&DPE) is Mastercard’s innovation engine for AI driven decisioning at global scale.
We build and enhance the platforms that power real time intelligence across Mastercard’s network — enabling:

• Millisecond latency decisioning
• Resilient, highly available global services
• Hundreds of AI models
• Hundreds of thousands of business rules
• 0 50+ market facing products across Mastercard Services
  Products that protect revenue, mitigate fraud, and empower customers worldwide
  AI&DPE teams ensure Mastercard delivers industry leading agility, intelligence, resiliency, and scalability in every product we build.

Role
This role involves working with a team of talented developers to develop high performance, high volume solutions. You will be responsible for:

• Lead day to day systems development and maintenance activities of the team to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and create solutions with high level of innovation, cost effectiveness, high quality and faster time to market.

• Accountable for full systems development life cycle including creating high quality requirements documents, use-cases, design and other technical artifacts including but not limited to detailed test strategy/test design, performance benchmarking, release rollout and deployment plans, contingency/back-out plans, feasibility study, cost and time analysis and detailed estimates.

• Collaborate with Architects, fellow Leads, Developers, Business Analysts & Product Owners in Dublin & other Mastercard locations.

• Develop high-quality, secure, scalable and maintainable Java-based software solutions.

• Apply best practices for automated testing, automated code quality, automated delivery & automated monitoring.

• Mentor the senior & junior engineers on your team through sound technical advice, UML documentation & code reviews.

• Assist with troubleshooting production incidents & channel learnings back into the development stream to mitigate future customer impact.

• Participate in Po Cs (Proof of Concept) and help the Department with selection of Vendor Solutions, Technologies, Methodologies and Frameworks.

• Collaborate with vendor resources for support of products.

• Conduct brownbag sessions on new and upcoming technologies, methodologies and application appropriate frameworks.

• Actively look for opportunities to enhance standards and improve process efficiency.

• Perform Quality Inspections and Walkthroughs throughout the SDLC including Requirements Review, Design Review, Code Review and Security Review to ensure compliance with Mastercard and PCI standards.

• Work as part of a co-located Agile SCRUM team.

• All About You

• Must be high-energy, detail-oriented, proactive and have the ability to function under pressure in an independent environment.

• Must provide the necessary skills to have a high degree of initiative and self-motivation to drive results.

• Possesses strong communication skills -- both verbal and written – and strong relationship, collaborative skills and organizational skills.

• Willingness and ability to learn and take on challenging opportunities and to work as a member of matrix based diverse and geographically distributed project team.

• Deep knowledge of software development processes including agile processes and test driven development.

• Experience with the design and development of complex, multi-tier software solutions.

• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical coaching; raise overall engineering quality.

• Own operational excellence for services: capacity planning, resiliency patterns, release governance, and production readiness reviews.

• Partner with product, architecture, and risk/compliance stakeholders to ensure solutions meet enterprise requirements (security, privacy, auditability).

• Drive continuous improvement (automation, testing strategy, developer experience, and measurable reduction of toil/incidents).

Ways of working:

• Acts as a multiplier: unblocks teams, drives alignment, and creates clarity in complex delivery contexts.
• Strong stakeholder management and crisp communication for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Sets the bar for engineering rigor while keeping delivery pragmatic and outcome-focused.

Typical Deliverables:

• Architecture decisions (ADRs), reference patterns, and service boundary definitions
• Cross-team delivery plans and risk mitigation
• Production readiness standards and reliability improvements
• Mentorship outcomes and measurable improvements in quality/velocity

Essential Skills required:

• A wide breadth and depth of technical experience using Java/JEE
• Strong Linux and shell scripting
• Oracle & PL/SQL and advanced SQL scripting
• Spring Framework (including Spring Boot)
• Web Services – REST/XML/JSON

Desirable Skills:

• Experience using Python
• Experience designing agentic AI systems using Lang Chain/Lang Graph (or equivalent), including multi-step tool orchestration, state management, evaluation, and governance patterns.
• Messaging – MQ and JMS
• Experience integrating vendor and open source products into an overall system
• Experience working with containerised environments, such as Kubernetes/Open Shift/Cloud Foundry
• Experience with integration frameworks such as Apache Camel/Spring Integration
• Experience with monitoring service performance
• Experience with visual design tools (Visio, Confluence Gliffy, etc.)

Success measures (example):

• Multiple blueprint-driven capabilities delivered predictably across teams.
• Reduced operational toil and improved SLO attainment for owned services.
• High engineering quality bar (review throughput, test coverage, design consistency).
• Clear technical direction adopted by teams; scalable patterns for agentic systems in production.

Experience level (guidance):
Typically 8–12+ years with demonstrated technical leadership, architecture ownership, and large-scale production delivery.

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.