Sr. Principal Software Engineer

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. As a Sr. Principal Engineer in the AI & Data Platform Engineering organization, you will provide technology leadership and strategic influence across enterprise-scale initiatives for the next generation Decision Management Platform. Your role will involve driving innovation and engineering excellence while collaborating with senior leaders and engineers to shape the technology strategy for the team.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• Experience with high-volume transactional systems, business rules management platforms, or real-time streaming pipelines
• Background working with large in-memory data grids, rule engines, or decisioning engines
• Experience contributing to organizational standards, technical publications, or architecture communities of practice
• Prior work in environments involving regulated data, compliance constraints, or high-availability requirements