Lead Software Development 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

Lead Software Development Engineer

Overview

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.

The Cyber & Intelligence (C&I) organization is responsible for Mastercard's security and risk-related product development efforts, delivering innovative solutions focused on cybersecurity, authentication, fraud prevention, risk mitigation, and dispute resolution across the global payments ecosystem.

We are seeking a highly skilled Lead Software Engineer to drive architecture, design, development, modernization, and operational excellence for mission-critical platforms. This role combines deep technical expertise, hands-on software engineering, architectural leadership, and mentoring to deliver secure, scalable, resilient, and high-performing solutions.

Role
• Drive the architectural design of software solutions, including dependent services, service interactions, integration patterns, technology standards, and governance practices.
• Design and build scalable, resilient, fault-tolerant platforms that meet performance, security, availability, and maintainability requirements.
• Lead technical decision-making and architecture reviews across multiple systems and engineering teams.
• Act as a hands-on developer and architect, writing high-quality, secure, modular, maintainable, and testable code.
• Create, evaluate, test, and deploy innovative technologies that optimize existing products and enable new business opportunities.
• Develop and maintain technology roadmaps focused on platform modernization, performance improvements, reliability, and cost optimization.
• Contribute across the full software development lifecycle including requirements analysis, design, development, documentation, testing, deployment, and ongoing support.
• Design and implement comprehensive testing strategies including unit, functional, integration, regression, and automated testing to ensure solution quality and reliability.
• Champion Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) practices across engineering teams.
• Lead code reviews and enforce engineering standards to ensure code quality, maintainability, security, and consistency with organizational best practices.
• Embed secure software development practices throughout the software development lifecycle, including secure design reviews, threat modeling, vulnerability remediation, and adherence to secure coding standards.
• Drive performance engineering initiatives through capacity planning, performance testing, system optimization, and scalability improvements.
• Own the operational characteristics of delivered solutions, including observability, monitoring, logging, alerting, reliability, maintainability, and recoverability.
• Ensure systems are designed for operational excellence by implementing robust monitoring, diagnostics, and support capabilities.
• Lead root cause analysis and resolution of complex production issues, driving continuous improvements to platform stability, resiliency, and service availability.
• Guide the modernization of legacy platforms using microservices architectures, cloud-native engineering practices, anti-corruption layers, and strangler-pattern approaches.
• Collaborate effectively with global engineering, product, operations, and security teams.
• Mentor engineers on software architecture, design patterns, engineering practices, coding standards, and emerging technologies.
• Serve as a technical leader and ambassador by presenting at internal forums, industry conferences, and engineering communities.

All About You
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Advanced expertise in software engineering, distributed systems, object-oriented design, algorithms, and data structures.
• Strong understanding of software architecture principles, design patterns, domain-driven design, and distributed system design.
• Proficiency in one or more modern programming languages such as Java, Scala, Node.js, TypeScript, Angular, or similar technologies.
• Demonstrated experience designing and developing enterprise-scale applications and services.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms, including IaaS, PaaS, serverless technologies, containerization, and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience with microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Advanced knowledge of secure coding practices, application security concepts, and software risk mitigation techniques.
• Experience designing and implementing automated testing frameworks and integration testing strategies.
• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, logging, performance tuning, and operational readiness.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot and resolve complex technical issues across application, infrastructure, and integration layers.
• Experience designing highly available and resilient systems that can withstand infrastructure and service failures.
• Strong analytical, communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.
• Experience working within Agile development environments.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and influence engineers through technical leadership and coaching.
• Passion for continuous learning, innovation, and engineering excellence.

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. THIS POSTING RELECTS ONE OR MORE CURRENT VACANCIES ON OUR TEAM, AND MASTERCARD INTENDS TO FILL THIS POSITION BY 01/12/2027. If the fill date has passed, Mastercard intends to fill this position as soon as possible.

Pay Ranges

O'Fallon, Missouri: $140,000 - $231,000 USD