Sr. Principal Software Engineer

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Sr. Principal Software Engineer

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. With deep architectural expertise and ability to collaborate across the organization, you will have the ability to drive innovation and engineering excellence. Key areas of focus include leveraging disruptive technologies in the real time AI inferencing and decisioning domain to improve product effectiveness, increase business agility, increase technical resilience and scalability, and lower cost of ownership.

You will work closely with the technology executive, senior leaders and engineers to play an important pivotal role in shaping the overall AI & DPE technology strategy for the wider AI & DPE team.

• 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.

• 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…