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

Principle Software Engineer:

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.
Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.

About the Role:

• We are seeking a visionary and hands-on Principal Architect to lead the architecture and design of Mastercard's Core Payment Systems — a globally distributed financial services platform. This platform handles high-throughput financial transactions using ISO8583 and ISO20022 standards and will be deployed across thousands of global locations in cloud and on-premises environments.
• Responsible for the analysis, design, development and delivery of software solutions. Defines requirements for new applications and customizations, adhering to standards, processes and best practices

Key Responsibilities:

• System Architecture & Design
  • Architect scalable, secure, and high-performance edge systems for financial transaction routing.
  • Design distributed systems capable of handling persistent TCP connections, ISO message parsing, transformation, validation, and routing.
  • Define and evolve the platform’s architecture using C++, Java, Golang, Axon and gRPC.
• Platform Engineering
  • Lead development of core routing logic, timers, retries, and business logic integration.
  • Ensure seamless integration with Mastercard’s backend systems via NGFT, gRPC, Axon.
  • Oversee containerization and deployment strategies using HP Non-Stop blade and X86 platforms and even using Kubernetes (K8s) across cloud and customer data centres.
• Fleet Management
  • Design and implement a robust fleet management system for global deployments.
  • Ensure observability, operability, and lifecycle management of edge nodes.
• Security & Compliance
  • Collaborate with security teams to integrate platform with Mastercard’s security subsystems.
  • Ensure compliance with financial regulations and data protection standards.
• Cloud & DevOps
  • Work closely with HP Non Stop Tandem infrastructure teams and even cloud infrastructure teams to define deployment pipelines, connectivity, and operational tooling.
  • Drive automation, CI/CD, and configuration-as-code and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Cross-functional Leadership
  • Collaborate with product, engineering, and operations teams to align architecture with business goals.
  • Mentor and guide engineering teams on best practices in distributed systems, cloud-native development, and secure coding.

Required Skills & Experience:

• Experience in software architecture, with deep expertise in distributed systems and edge computing.
• Strong proficiency in C++, Tandem HP Nonstop, Golang, gRPC, Axon, NGFT and TCP/IP networking.
• Experience with ISO8583, ISO20022, or other financial messaging standards.
• Proven track record in designing and operating Kubernetes-based platforms at scale.
• Deep understanding of Hp Non-stop and also cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and on-premises deployments.
• Experience with DevOps, CI/CD, observability, and fleet management.
• Strong knowledge of security architecture, including authentication, authorization, and secure communication.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence across teams and geographies.
• Progressively grown career with proven design and development experiences in multiple languages, secure coding standards (e.g., OWASP, CWE, SEI CERT), and vulnerability management.
• Understands internals of operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mainframe) to deliver interoperable and performant code.
• Has skills to develop and evangelize on reference architecture and run principles to help teams adopt Engineering Principles from the start (poison pill, active/active/active, auto-scaling, self-healing, others)
• Understands use cases for advanced design patterns (e.g., service-to-worker, MVC, API gateway, intercepting filter, dependency injection, lazy loading, all from gang of four) to implement efficient code
• Understands and implements Application Programming Interface (API) standards and cataloging to drive API/service adoption and commercialization
• Has skills to promote and coach teams on take on full stack development and facilitate end-to-end service ownership
• Has skills to engage engineers across Technology organization to promote standard software patterns and reuse of common libraries and services
• Has experience in leading and coaching teams to perform software planning and estimation for large scale complex programs
• Has skills to drive trade-off discussions to set right development capacity based on value drivers (e.g., regulatory, security, new business, market parity, technical debt)
• Has experience in design and execution of automation across multiple business areas and provides guidance on best methods and tools.
• Has an expert understanding of DevOps best practices to guide developers and abstract application development from underlying hosting platforms and infrastructure
• Performance engineering experience to ensure applications are built to scale, run, and perform for varying demands
• Has skills to succinctly articulate architecture patterns of complex systems, with business and technical implications, to executive and customer stakeholders
• Has skills to implement advanced test set ups in production environment (e.g., A/B testing, canary releases, blue-green deployment, feature flags)
• Experience with the following technologies:
• Unix/Linux and shell scripting
  C++(primary focus) and Java
  • HP Non-Stop Tandem – blade and X86 systems
• Configuration Management tools (e.g. SVN, Git, Bitbucket)
• Has skills to define and drive advanced chaos and other operational testing practices to test points of failures, monitors, and system behaviours under adverse conditions (e.g., resource spikes, network congestion, component or infrastructure failure)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in financial services or payment systems.
• Familiarity with PCI-DSS and other financial compliance frameworks.

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.