Lead Software Engineer (Real-Time Payments)

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.
Title and Summary
Lead Software Engineer (Real-Time Payments)
Overview
The Realtime Payments (RTP) program is driving the global transition toward instant, account-to-account payments, enabling secure, low-latency, and highly resilient payment services across multiple live markets.
RTP platforms operate as mission-critical financial infrastructure, supporting high transaction volumes, strict regulatory expectations, and very high availability requirements.
Engineering in RTP is focused on delivering robust, scalable, and operable platforms-balancing feature delivery with strong engineering discipline, non-functional excellence, and long-term maintainability in line with Mastercard's enterprise standards.
Role
We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership and execution for a RTP product or platform capability.
This role is ideal for an experienced senior engineer who:
Leads day-to-day technical execution for a team or product area
Remains hands-on in design and implementation, especially for complex flows
Acts as the technical anchor for delivery quality, reliability, and operability
Coaches engineers and raises the engineering bar through example
The Lead Software Engineer partners closely with Product, Architecture, and Operations to ensure solutions are built correctly, perform reliably in production, and conform to RTP and Mastercard engineering standards.
Key Responsibilities
1. Design & Technical Delivery
Own detailed design and implementation for features, services, or subsystems within a RTP product or capability.
Apply established reference architectures and patterns (e.g., microservices, event-driven design) consistently.
Translate functional and non-functional requirements into robust, production-ready solutions.
Participate actively in technical design reviews and incorporate feedback from architects and peers.
Make sound technology decisions at the team level, balancing delivery speed, risk, and maintainability.
Drive end-to-end delivery for assigned features-from design through production support.
2. Hands-on Engineering & Code Quality
Remain actively hands-on for critical paths, complex integrations, and performance-sensitive components.
Lead by example in clean code, testability, and maintainable design.
Conduct and contribute to code reviews, ensuring quality, security, and performance standards are met.
Support engineers in solving non-trivial technical problems across application, messaging, and data layers.
Promote disciplined development practices, including automated testing and CI/CD usage.
3. Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) Ownership
Design solutions to meet defined performance, scalability, reliability, and security requirements.
Contribute to defining service-level indicators (SLIs) and objectives (SLOs) for owned components.
Ensure production readiness through appropriate observability (metrics, logs, traces) and capacity awareness.
Participate in performance testing, production readiness reviews, and operational validations.
Support incident analysis, root cause identification, and remediation activities as needed.
4. Engineering Leadership & Team Enablement
Act as the primary technical point of contact for a team or feature area.
Mentor engineers through design discussions, code reviews, and problem solving.
Support technical onboarding and knowledge sharing within the team.
Promote accountability, quality, and ownership mindset across day-to-day engineering work.
Collaborate effectively with Product Managers, Architects, QA, and Operations partners.
5. Continuous Improvement & Platform Health
Identify and address technical debt within owned areas.
Improve reliability, performance, and maintainability incrementally over time.
Adopt and reinforce Mastercard engineering standards, security practices, and compliance requirements.
Contribute suggestions and feedback for broader platform and engineering improvements.
All About You
Experience & Technical Skills
7-10 years of experience in software engineering, including building and supporting enterprise backend systems.
Strong hands-on experience designing and building distributed systems.
Solid understanding of microservices and event-driven architectures.
Practical experience with performance tuning, scalability, and failure handling.
Experience working in production environments with on-call or operational responsibility.
Technology Background
Strong backend engineering experience using languages and frameworks such as Java/Spring or similar.
Experience with messaging, APIs, and data persistence technologies.
Familiarity with observability tools, logging frameworks, and monitoring approaches.
Exposure to cloud and containerized environments is preferred.
Experience in payments or other regulated, high-availability systems is a plus.
Ways of Working
Comfortable leading technical work while remaining hands-on.
Able to collaborate and influence within a cross-functional team.
Clear communicator who can explain technical concepts to engineers and non-engineers.
Pragmatic mindset focused on delivering high-quality software that works reliably in production.
Commitment to continuous learning and improvement.
Corporate Security Responsibility
All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard's security policies and practices;
• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;
• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and
• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard's guidelines.