Description
Mastercard is seeking a Lead Software Engineer with strong expertise in C/C++ and Unix/Linux systems to design, develop, and lead high-performance, scalable, and secure enterprise applications.
The role requires hands-on technical leadership, architecture ownership, and cross-team collaboration to deliver mission-critical systems. Lead engineers are expected to own complex problems, drive architectural decisions, and mentor engineering teams, while ensuring high-quality software delivery.
Key Responsibilities:
- Technical Leadership & Architecture: Design and develop high-performance, low-latency systems using C/C++ on Unix/Linux platforms. Own end-to-end architecture for components and services, ensuring scalability and resiliency. Introduce and adopt modern design patterns, frameworks, and best practices. Provide technical direction and guidance to engineering teams.
- Development & Delivery: Lead design, development, testing, and deployment activities. Write efficient, maintainable, and secure C/C++ code adhering to coding standards. Drive automation of builds, testing, and deployment pipelines. Troubleshoot complex production issues and ensure system stability.
- System Design & Performance: Architect systems for high throughput, fault tolerance, and performance optimization. Perform performance tuning, memory optimization, and multithreading enhancements. Ensure system reliability and availability (high uptime expectations).
- Collaboration & Stakeholder Management: Work closely with product, QA, and operations teams to prioritize and deliver solutions. Drive design discussions, trade-offs, and cross-functional decisions. Coordinate across geographically distributed teams.
- Mentorship & Engineering Excellence: Mentor developers and promote best practices (code reviews, TDD, secure coding). Conduct technical interviews and help build high-performing teams. Lead post-incident reviews and drive continuous improvement initiatives.
Required Technical Skills:
- Strong experience of Cryptography in Payment cycle.
- Strong experience of Session Key Derivation and validation.
- Strong experience of Triple DES and Advanced Encryption Standard techniques.
- Strong understanding of Thales or equivalent Payment Validation HSM modules and its commands.
- Strong programming expertise in C and C++.
- Deep understanding of Unix/Linux systems, shell scripting, and system internals.
- Strong understanding multi threading in C and Linux.
- Experience with Multithreading and concurrency, Memory management and performance tuning, Socket programming / IPC mechanisms.
- Knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and design patterns.
- Familiarity with build tools (Make/CMake), debugging tools (gdb), gtest, and profiling tools.
- Strong experience of Github and Github Copilot.
- Strong experience of using Copilot with MCP servers.
All About you:
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
- Experience with Agile methodologies, strong understanding of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience writing unit, integration, and system tests.
- Experience designing distributed systems or high-scale enterprise applications.
- Exposure to security standards (OWASP, secure coding practices).
- Experience in payment systems / transaction processing / financial domain.
- Exposure to cloud-native or hybrid systems.
- Knowledge of additional languages (Java/Python) is a plus.
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
- Ability to drive decisions and manage technical trade-offs.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management.
- Ownership mindset and ability to lead under ambiguity.