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.

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