Lead Software Development Engineer

Mastercard is seeking a highly skilled Lead Software Engineer to drive architecture, design, development, modernization, and operational excellence for mission-critical platforms.

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• 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