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

Who is Mastercard?
Mastercard is a global technology company powering an inclusive digital economy. Through secure networks, data-driven insights, and innovative solutions, we enable safe, simple, and smart digital commerce across more than 210 countries and territories.
Within Consumer Authentication Solutions (CAS), Mastercard delivers the critical authentication infrastructure that protects billions of digital transactions globally. CAS provides capabilities including EMV 3DS, Identity Check, Directory Services, Smart Authentication, tokenized authentication, issuer enablement, and risk-based authentication.
As a Principal Software Engineer, you serve as a distinguished technical leader responsible for shaping the architecture, engineering strategy, and long-term technical direction of critical authentication platforms. You drive solutions to complex business and technical challenges, influence engineering decisions across multiple teams, and establish standards that improve the scalability, resiliency, security, and operational excellence of Mastercard's authentication ecosystem.
This role requires deep technical expertise, exceptional system design skills, and the ability to lead through influence while mentoring engineers and advancing engineering excellence across the organization. Consistent with Principal SDE expectations, you are recognized as a technical authority, a trusted advisor, and a driver of innovation across large-scale initiatives.
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Role
Technical Leadership & Architecture
• Define and drive the long-term technical vision for critical authentication and identity platforms.
• Lead the architecture and design of highly scalable, resilient, distributed systems supporting global payment authentication services.
• Establish engineering standards, reference architectures, design patterns, and best practices across multiple product and platform teams.
• Make strategic technology decisions balancing performance, resiliency, security, maintainability, operational excellence, and speed to market.
• Identify and solve complex technical challenges that span organizational and architectural boundaries.
• Drive architectural evolution toward cloud-native, event-driven, and service-oriented solutions.
Engineering Excellence
• Maintain meaningful hands-on involvement while leading large technical initiatives and critical architectural efforts.
• Champion high-quality software engineering practices, code quality, automation, observability, and operational readiness.
• Lead design reviews for major programs and provide guidance on technical tradeoffs, risk mitigation, and implementation approaches.
• Ensure solutions are built with reliability, compliance, security, and scalability as foundational principles.
• Drive adoption of modern engineering practices including CI/CD, automation-first operations, and resilience engineering.
Organizational Influence
• Influence technical direction across multiple teams and business initiatives.
• Partner closely with Product, Architecture, Security, Engineering, SRE, and Operational leaders to align technology strategy with business objectives.
• Serve as a trusted advisor for large-scale programs and enterprise-level initiatives.
• Foster collaboration across teams and drive consensus on complex technical decisions.
• Represent engineering strategy and architectural recommendations to senior leadership and executive stakeholders.
Mentorship & Talent Development
• Provide technical mentorship to senior engineers, lead engineers, and engineering leaders.
• Raise engineering capability across the organization through coaching, design guidance, and technical leadership.
• Promote a culture of innovation, collaboration, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence.
• Contribute significantly to onboarding, knowledge sharing, and development of technical talent.
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About You
Technical Expertise
• Recognized technical expert with a proven track record leading large-scale software engineering initiatives.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture, microservices, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and enterprise application development.
• Advanced experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant, and globally distributed systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, gRPC, and modern application frameworks.
• Experience building cloud-native platforms utilizing Kubernetes, Docker, and enterprise cloud technologies.
• Expertise with event-driven architectures and messaging technologies such as Kafka, NATS, and MQ.
• Strong understanding of performance engineering, system scalability, reliability patterns, and resiliency design.
• Experience implementing secure software development practices and enterprise-grade security controls.
• Deep understanding of observability, monitoring, incident management, disaster recovery, and operational excellence.
Leadership & Collaboration
• Proven ability to lead large, complex engineering efforts involving multiple teams, stakeholders, and business functions.
• Skilled at driving consensus and influencing technical decisions without direct authority.
• Highly regarded mentor and advisor with a demonstrated commitment to developing engineering talent.
• Excellent communicator capable of translating complex technical concepts for engineering, business, and executive audiences.
• Maintains awareness of emerging technologies, industry trends, and engineering best practices, applying them to create business value.
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Education
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field. Experience within payments, fintech, digital identity, authentication, or high-scale transaction processing environments is strongly preferred.

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 [email protected] 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: $170,000 - $281,000 USD