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 specializing in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and empower an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by ensuring transactions are safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Utilizing secure data and networks, strategic partnerships, and passion, our innovations and solutions support individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses in realizing their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and influences everything we do both within and outside of our company. With connections spanning more than 210 countries and territories, we are committed to building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.

Overview

Mastercard is looking for a talented Principal Software Engineer to join the Mastercard Foundry Research and Development team in our Nairobi office. In this role you will be part of a highly agile, AI native development team building innovative large-scale software platforms and solutions from ideation to release. Our team is built on a foundation of research and development, mining innovation internally, innovating new product lines with emerging technology, managing new products from inception to market validation and engaging strategically with start-ups to shape the future of commerce with and for our customers. At Mastercard you will help define the future of commerce globally.

As an architect on the R&D team, you will be at the forefront of the design of complex, large-scale data-oriented new product concepts. This is a hands-on role for an engineer who is deeply engaged in using Generative and Agentic AI through the full product development lifecycle. You will work on lean, high-performance pods to architect software solutions to rapidly evolving product concepts which heavily leverage Mastercard and other datasets. The team will rapidly experiment with and iterate on AI native ways of working.
We are looking for someone with deep experience designing large-scale customer-facing applications with significant data dependencies and significant experience leveraging AI in software architecture.

Responsibilities of the role include:
• Design highly scalable solution architectures for complex, early-stage product concepts across technology stacks, data platforms, and environments
• Be a cultural influencer in use, adoption, and innovation of AI in solution architecture and software engineering through all phases of the product development lifecycle
• Provide technical leadership on projects to architect, design, implement, deploy, and release complex applications, interfaces, and integrations
• Contribute significantly to the technical strategy and lead implementation of the architecture of Data Platforms in Foundry R&D
• Lead the scaling of AI systems including observability, evaluation, and cost optimization
• Establish best practices for responsible AI, ensuring compliance, explainability and data privacy
• Coach teams on technical best practices and use of AI across the Product Development Life Cycle

Skills / Qualifications:
• Hands on experience architecting and building 0  1 applications using Generative AI, LLMs, or agentic patterns
• Expertise leading the architecture, design, implementation, and release of complex products and applications
• Extensive experience in senior engineering roles in enterprise-scale environments
• Experience with one or more modern AI frameworks and SDKs for agent orchestration, AI application development, or coding-agent workflows (e.g., LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, or Codex SDK)
• Expertise in cloud platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, AWS, and Azure
• Knowledge of AI/ML, data analytics, and data product development with emphasis on data quality, data privacy, and localization
• Usage of AI as part of daily engineering practice
• Bearing both engineering depth and a product mindset
• Proficiency with Java, Spring Boot, React, Typescript, Postgres and other object-oriented languages, front-end frameworks, and database technologies
• Strong business acumen and ability to apply technology to solve business problems
• Excellent verbal and written communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
• Proven track record as a highly effective technical mentor

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.