Senior Principal Software Engineer

Role Overview

• Lead architectural design for complex, enterprise-wide initiatives involving multiple services, programs, and high-scale decisioning workloads.
• Define service interactions, data flows, dependency models, and architecture policies that ensure scalability, resiliency, and security.
• Partner with business and product leaders to architect new services that enable innovative Mastercard products and decision capabilities.
• Improve the end-to-end experience of internal and external customers across services and applications.
• Simplify and optimize architecture strategies to balance cost efficiency, performance, and functional requirements.
• Apply expert-level technical judgment to guide trade-offs in large-scale design and implementation.
• Drive engineering best practices, software craftsmanship, and architectural rigor across the organization.
• Represent the engineering organization through technical presentations, publications, and internal knowledge-sharing sessions.
• Participate in Principal-level architecture reviews and address complex enterprise-wide technical challenges.
• Work across organizational boundaries to identify integration opportunities, reduce redundancy, and drive platform cohesion.
• Mentor engineers and rising architects to elevate technical expertise and leadership within the organization.
• Promote knowledge sharing across guilds, programs, and engineering communities.
• Conduct deep technical interviews and help identify candidates who raise the engineering bar.
• Champion behaviors that support a culture of excellence, inclusivity, and accountability.

Requirements

• Extensive hands-on software engineering experience building and architecting distributed systems or real-time processing platforms.
• Deep architectural expertise in large-scale, high-throughput systems, including end-to-end service design, data flows, and dependency modeling.
• Strong experience with cloud and data platform technologies, real-time decisioning, and enterprise-grade system reliability and security.
• Prior work integrating AI/ML or analytic models into production systems, especially for real-time or near real-time workloads.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical designs, influence cross-functional engineering teams, and guide platform-wide architectural decisions.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and technical leadership skills, with experience mentoring senior engineers.

Tech Stack

• Cloud
• Distributed Systems

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