Lead Software Engineer - Distributed Microservices Platform

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 - Distributed Microservices Platform
Role overview
This role combines technical leadership, system design, and practical engineering contribution. You will guide the technical direction of the team while staying close to implementation-supporting delivery, resolving complex issues, and ensuring high-quality outcomes.
You will be part of the Virtual Card Management domain within CTMC, working on platforms that enable card controls, transaction flows, and commercial payment capabilities at scale.
The role operates across a mixed architecture landscape-both monolithic applications and modern microservices-with a strong focus on platform resilience, reliability, and safe evolution while continuing to deliver business-critical features.
What you'll do
* Technical delivery & execution
- Lead delivery of backend services and applications using Java / Spring Boot
- Contribute to system design, implementation, and technical problem-solving
- Ensure solutions are scalable, maintainable, and resilient
- Use AI-assisted development and automation tools to improve productivity and code quality
- End-to-end ownership
- Guide features through design, development, testing, release, and production support
- Drive high standards across code quality, testing, deployments, and operational readiness
- Identify and mitigate delivery, stability, and dependency risks
* Architecture & modernization
- Evolve system architecture across monolith and microservices environments
- Define APIs, integration patterns, and event-driven/data flow designs
- Drive modernization while maintaining platform stability and availability
- Embed resilience patterns such as fault tolerance, graceful degradation, and safe rollouts
- Production reliability
- Act as an escalation point for technical issues and incidents
- Lead root cause analysis and implement long-term fixes
- Improve reliability through observability, refactoring, and operational best practices
- Cross-team collaboration & engineering standards
- Collaborate across teams to align delivery and integrations
- Clarify ownership across shared services and legacy systems
- Set engineering standards and provide technical guidance through design, code, and test reviews
* Tech stack & environment
Java (Spring Boot), monolithic and microservices architectures, REST/event-driven integrations, CI/CD (Jenkins), cloud platforms (PCF/Kubernetes), Oracle databases, observability (Dynatrace/Splunk), and secure SDLC tooling (Sonar, Checkmarx, Black Duck).
* Must-have
- Strong backend engineering background (8+ years) with experience across system design and delivery
- Experience working with both monolithic and microservices-based systems
- Proven ability to lead technical delivery in complex, distributed environments
- Strong problem-solving and debugging skills across multiple system layers
- Ability to balance technical leadership, hands-on contribution, and team enablement
- Experience building or operating highly available, resilient systems
* Nice-to-have
- Experience in financial services or high-availability platforms
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures, resilience patterns, and modernization strategies
- Experience operating in governed or regulated delivery environments
- Exposure to AI-assisted engineering and intelligent automation, including use of tools or agents to enhance development workflows, testing, or operational efficiency
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.