Description
Mastercard's Open Finance team is seeking a Senior Principal, Software Architect to define and drive the architecture that enables this vision.
This is a hands-on individual contributor role with broad influence across Product, Engineering, and Technology. You will establish the target architecture, define a practical path from today's platforms to a unified global ecosystem, and partner across teams to deliver scalable, secure, and resilient solutions.
Success in this role means enabling teams to build faster, promoting consistent and reusable capabilities across markets, and creating a platform that securely connects consumers, businesses, and financial institutions through seamless Open Finance experiences.
Responsibilities:
- Define and drive the North Star architecture for Mastercard Open Finance, translating business and product strategy into a scalable, long-term technology vision.
- Develop and execute phased architecture roadmaps that modernize existing platforms while establishing clear priorities, dependencies, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
- Lead architectural decision-making across Product, Engineering, and Technology, balancing competing requirements and aligning teams around common goals.
- Evaluate complex technical challenges, identify architectural risks, and develop proofs of concept to validate solutions.
- Use generative AI and AI-assisted engineering practices to research and challenge designs, accelerate prototyping, and improve engineering effectiveness.
- Establish and promote reusable architecture patterns, reference implementations, Infrastructure as Code, automation frameworks, and engineering standards.
- Simplify and modernize the platform by consolidating overlapping capabilities, reducing unnecessary dependencies, and retiring legacy technologies.
- Design and evolve cloud-native services supporting bank connectivity, consent management, identity, financial data aggregation, and account-to-account payment capabilities.
- Balance global platform consistency with local regulatory, compliance, privacy, data residency, and market-specific requirements.
- Guide architecture from concept through production, ensuring solutions are secure, resilient, scalable, observable, high-performing, and cost-efficient.
- Influence technical and business decisions across all levels of the organization by translating complex architectural concepts into clear business outcomes and strategic recommendations.
- Mentor architects and engineers, foster cross-functional collaboration, and promote engineering excellence through technical leadership and partnership.
Requirements:
- Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Lead Architect, Software Architect, Distinguished Engineer, or equivalent technical leadership role driving enterprise-scale architecture and platform strategy.
- Strong computer science foundation with a proven track record of designing and building large-scale distributed platforms.
- Strong hands-on software engineering and coding skills, with the ability to independently investigate complex problems and develop prototypes.
- Demonstrated experience leveraging generative AI to improve engineering productivity and solution design.
- Deep expertise in cloud platforms, APIs, distributed systems, data architecture, identity management, security, and enterprise integration patterns.