Lead 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

Lead Software Engineer

Who is Mastercard?
We work 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. We cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences enable us to be a better team – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation, and delivers better business results.

Technology at Mastercard
What we create today will define tomorrow. Revolutionary technologies that reshape the digital economy to be more connected and inclusive than ever before. Safer, faster, more sustainable.
And we need the best people to do it. Technologists who are energized by the challenges of a truly global network. With the talent and vision to create the critical systems and products that power global commerce and connect people everywhere to the vital goods and services they need every day.
Working at Mastercard means being part of a unique culture. Inclusive and diverse, a rich collaboration of ideas and perspectives. A place that celebrates your strengths, values your experiences, and offers you the flexibility to shape a career across disciplines and continents. And the opportunity to work alongside experts and leaders at every level of the business, improving what exists, and inventing what’s next.

About the role
Software Engineers at Mastercard design and code a variety of applications covering transaction processing, analytics, user interfaces, and APIs using a blend of cutting-edge technologies across big data, distributed systems, machine learning, and more. As a Software Engineer, you will deliver these products and solutions with speed and agility as part of a small team. This will involve developing high-performing, highly scalable software solutions and products for some of the world’s top brands. Specific tasks vary depending on the project and the business unit that you join in.
All staff at Mastercard are expected to demonstrate 'Mastercard Way' cultural values every day - own it, simplify it, sense of urgency, thoughtful risk-taking, unlock potential, and be inclusive – with a relentless focus on our customers. As a Lead Software Engineer at Mastercard, you are expected to perform the following general responsibilities:
• Own complex problems with dependency across services and facilitate cross-functional team interactions to drive resolution 
• Drive prioritization decisions and trade-offs in working with product partners 
• Automate and simplify all aspects of software delivery and development 
• Introduce new technologies and architecture by following enterprise guidelines 
• Provide development and architecture guidance to team members 

All about you
What’s it all about and what we expect you to do day to day?

· Own complex problems having dependency across services and facilitate cross-functional team interactions to drive resolution

· Write code to build and enhance applications/services and promote code-reviews, code scanning, and other standard development practices to deliver high-quality artifacts to production.

· Define, design, and develop procedures and solutions at a service level to meet the business requirements/enhancements

· Participate and contribute to team’s agile process and decisions. Understand and contribute to Prioritization. Drive prioritization decisions and trade-offs in working with product partners

· Identify opportunities and build backlogs to enhance primary service/function

· Automate and simplify all aspects of software delivery and development actively evangelizing the need to automate and simplify where needed.

· Lead by example with hands-on approaches to demonstrate engineering excellence. Able to troubleshoot and refactor existing code for exceptional code quality.

· Drive seamless integration across all connected services to meet end-user expectations

· Drive blameless postmortems culture to identify root causes of incidents and implement learnings

· Introduce new technologies and architecture by following enterprise guidelines

· Advocate for engineering principles outside of current organization/platform

· Provide development and architecture guidance to team members

· Build relationships and effective partnerships across organizations

· Conduct technical interviews for hiring engineering staff and raising the performance bar

· Experience working in cross-functional and large projects with globally dispersed development resources

All About You and What you need to bring:

• Able to write secure code and hands-on experience on Java, spring.

• Must have hands-on experience on AI based development, GitHub copilot, Claude code.

• Must have hands-on experience on messaging systems like kafka, event driven architecture.

• Familiar with secure coding standards (e.g., OWASP, CWE, SEI CERT) and vulnerability management

• Understands and implements Application Programming Interface (API) standards and cataloguing to drive API/service adoption and commercialization and effort estimation

• Has skills to elaborate and estimate non-functional requirements, including security (e.g., data protection, authentication, authorization), regulatory, and performance (SLAs, throughput, transactions per second)

• Familiar with different application patterns to implement different types of business processes (e.g., APIs, event-driven-services, batch-services, web-applications, big data)

• Able to perform debugging and troubleshooting to analyze core, heap, thread dumps and remove coding errors

• Has skills to conduct product demos and co-ordinate with product owners to drive product acceptance signoffs

• Drives operational excellence by suggesting improvements to product modules/features using test data, performance data, and production metrics. Leverage testing to verify both functional and non-functional application requirements. Drives efforts to build and maintain lower environments that accurately reflect production.

• Demonstrable expertise with root cause analysis of issues in multi-tier distributed systems, with the ability to prescribe risk-reward balanced short-, mid- and long-term changes, over multiple release cycles.

• Highly regarded mentor. Instills best practices and proactively coaches others to high technical and quality standards. Identifies and sponsors junior teammates for key growth opportunities.

• Approaches discussions and problem solving, across organization and team boundaries with differing motivations/priorities, with empathy and a goal of building consensus. Finds way pitches in and lends support where needed. Valuable partner with organization and business partners in all roles and geographies.

• Key technical voice in anticipating, articulating, and evangelizing solutions to technical challenges, spanning org/team boundaries, based on broader industry trends, prioritized based on business needs

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.