Lead Site Reliability Engineer 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 Site Reliability Engineer:

Overview:

The Mastercard Business Operations (Biz Ops) organization is seeking a Lead Biz Ops Engineer to serve as a technical authority and operational architect across critical platforms. This role is designed for a senior individual contributor who thrives at system‑level thinking, drives SRE, DevOps maturity at scale, and influences outcomes across programs, portfolios.
As a Lead Biz Ops Engineer, you will operate beyond a single application or team, shaping reliability strategy, defining standards, and elevating operational excellence across Mastercard’s most business‑critical services. You will partner deeply with product engineering, architecture, security, and leadership to ensure platforms are designed, delivered, and operated with resilience, scalability, and customer trust at their core.
If this describes you, you’ll feel at home here:
You proactively design out operational risk rather than reacting to it.
You influence without authority and lead through technical credibility and data.
You see CI/CD, automation, observability, and reliability as foundational engineering disciplines, not tooling exercises.
Biz Ops is at the forefront of Mastercard’s Operational Resilience evolution, driving modern tooling, standardized practices, and consistent operating models across the enterprise.

Mission
Biz Ops acts as the production readiness and operational resilience steward for Mastercard platforms.
As a Lead Biz Ops Engineer, your mission is to embed reliability, operability, and compliance into platform design and delivery, ensuring services are:
Highly available, resilient, and performant
Observable, self‑healing, and automation‑driven
Secure, compliant, and auditable by design
Operated through repeatable, scalable, low‑toil processes
You will provide continuous feedback loops into engineering and product teams, ensuring lessons learned from production meaningfully improve future designs and customer experience.

What We Do in Biz Ops:

We deliver this mission through:
Deep incident ownership with rigorous root‑cause analysis tied to business impact
A shift‑left operational mindset, influencing architecture and design before code reaches production
Enterprise‑grade risk management, controls, and compliance oversight
Standardized and streamlined support models that reduce friction for partners
Bridging product intent and operational reality to deliver reliable, customer‑centric platforms
At the Lead level, you are expected to shape these practices, not just execute them.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Architecture:

Act as a Lead‑level technical authority for reliability, operability, and production readiness across multiple platforms or programs.
Influence system architecture, design patterns, and platform standards to improve resiliency, scalability, and fault tolerance.
Partner with engineering and architecture teams during pre‑production and roadmap phases to guide capacity planning, failure modeling, and launch readiness.
Challenge designs constructively, advocating for operational simplicity, automation, and sustainable on‑call models.

Operational Excellence & Reliability:

Own and evolve availability, latency, performance, and reliability objectives for critical systems.
Lead complex production events and cross‑platform investigations, reducing MTTR through systemic fixes, not workarounds.
Champion blameless postmortems, ensuring remediation actions translate into measurable reliability improvements.
Identify recurring failure patterns and drive engineering‑led elimination of toil.
DevOps, CI/CD & Automation
Provide leadership for CI/CD strategy, ensuring pipelines support automated validation, risk‑based gating, and safe, repeatable deployments.
Drive adoption of automation‑first practices across build, deploy, test, recovery, and compliance workflows.
Influence DevOps standards across teams, enabling consistent, high‑quality software delivery at scale.
Observability & Self‑Healing Systems
Define and promote standards for monitoring, alerting, SLOs, and telemetry.
Enable proactive detection, predictive alerting, and self‑healing capabilities across platforms.
Ensure observability is treated as a first‑class architectural requirement, not an afterthought.
Risk, Controls & Compliance
Partner with security, risk, and compliance teams to embed controls, auditability, and regulatory requirements into platform design and operations.
Ensure operational practices meet Mastercard’s enterprise risk and compliance expectations across all environments.
Influence, Mentorship & Thought Leadership
Mentor senior and junior engineers, raising the technical bar across the Biz Ops community.
Contribute to guild initiatives, standards, whitepapers, and best‑practice guidance.
Influence leaders and peers through data, experience, and clear technical narratives.
Represent Biz Ops in cross‑organizational forums as a trusted advisor on reliability and operations.

Qualifications Required:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
Deep expertise in distributed systems, reliability engineering, and production operations.
Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, system design, and automation.
Advanced troubleshooting skills across the full technology stack.
Proven ability to drive decisions and outcomes in high‑pressure, high‑impact environments.
Possess a solid understanding of databases, blob-stores like S3, and load balancers.
Proficiency in one or more of: Python, Go, Bash.
Extensive hands‑on experience with DevOps and observability tooling, such as(or similar tools):

• Git / Bitbucket
• Jenkins / XLR
• Chef, Ansible
• Splunk
• Dynatrace
• Demonstrated success building and scaling CI/CD pipelines with minimal manual intervention.

Preferred / Deep Expertise
Certificate Management, PKI, Authentication & Authorization
LDAP, Active Directory Services, Access Provisioning
Controls, Audit, and Compliance frameworks

SOAP and REST APIs and integration patterns:

All About You:

You are strategic yet hands‑on, able to zoom out to enterprise impact and zoom in to code or configs.
You operate with calm authority under pressure.
You challenge the status quo with respect and data.
You value sustainability, clarity, and engineering excellence.
You are motivated by impact, scale, and long‑term improvement, not just delivery.

Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact reasonable_accommodation@mastercard.com and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.

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.

In line with Mastercard’s total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in the US, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive base salary and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. The base salary offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including but not limited to location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Mastercard benefits for full time (and certain part time) employees generally include: insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance); flexible spending account and health savings account; paid leaves (including 16 weeks of new parent leave and up to 20 days of bereavement leave); 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time, 25 days of vacation time and 5 personal days, pro-rated based on date of hire; 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays; 401k with a best-in-class company match; deferred compensation for eligible roles; fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities; eligibility for tuition reimbursement; and many more. Mastercard benefits for interns generally include: 56 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time; jury duty leave; and on-site fitness facilities in some locations.

Pay Ranges

O'Fallon, Missouri: $122,000 - $207,000 USD