Principal Product Architect

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
Principal Product Architect
Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we are building a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. Through secure, simple and accessible digital payments, our technology, partnerships and networks help people, businesses and governments reach their full potential.
A2A Risk Solutions: Principal Product Architect
We are seeking a Principal Product Architect to join our award-winning Account-to-Account (A2A) Risk Solutions team. Our products combine advanced data science and payments expertise to help financial institutions combat fraud and financial crime.
This role will be central to designing and scaling Mastercard's global A2A Risk Solutions. Working closely with product, engineering, data science, customers, financial institutions and technology partners, you will define scalable architecture patterns, shape technology strategy and support expansion into new markets.
Responsibilities
Define and maintain solution architectures that align with business objectives, product requirements and architectural principles.
Translate business, customer and market requirements into scalable, secure and resilient technical designs.
Lead architecture for A2A fraud and financial crime solutions, ensuring adaptability across global and regional implementations.
Define and govern API standards, integration approaches and service interactions.
Design reusable architecture patterns and deployment models that accelerate market onboarding and customer integration.
Collaborate with engineering, product, data science and delivery teams to support planning, estimation and execution.
Partner with third-party technology providers to develop integration strategies and manage architectural dependencies.
Drive technology evaluations, software selection and architectural decision-making.
Identify opportunities to improve performance, scalability, resilience and operational efficiency.
Shape the technology roadmap, including cloud strategy, data architecture, APIs, operational resilience and platform evolution.
Act as a technical advisor to customers, financial institutions and internal stakeholders, communicating architecture, deployment options and implementation trade-offs.
Evaluate emerging technologies and industry trends that can strengthen fraud detection, decisioning capabilities and platform scalability.
Ensure solutions comply with Mastercard standards and relevant regulatory requirements.
Qualifications
Extensive experience designing enterprise-scale, high-volume, low-latency distributed systems.
Strong knowledge of API design, governance and industry standards, including OpenAPI.
Experience with cloud-native architectures, microservices, containers, orchestration platforms and event-driven systems.
Expertise in DevOps practices, CI/CD and modern software delivery methodologies.
Experience with streaming platforms, NoSQL technologies and large-scale data processing.
Understanding of machine learning deployment and production environments.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to engage technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Proven ability to balance business requirements with technical constraints and architectural trade-offs.
Experience making technology decisions across architecture, databases, platforms and development frameworks.
Knowledge of public, private and hybrid cloud environments, including architecture and cost considerations.
Understanding of resilience engineering, operational testing, monitoring and production deployment strategies such as canary releases, blue-green deployments and feature flags.
Familiarity with security, privacy and compliance requirements, including GDPR and PCI DSS.
Experience defining and promoting architectural principles, standards and best practices.
Knowledge of data protection approaches including tokenization and anonymization.
Familiarity with enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF.
Experience in payments, fraud prevention, financial crime, transaction monitoring, scam prevention, money mule detection or real-time risk decisioning solutions.
Experience working with customers, financial institutions and technology partners on solution design and implementation.
Practical experience with AWS or equivalent cloud technologies.
Ability to influence technology strategy and guide long-term platform evolution.
Location
This is a hybrid role based in central London. Team members are expected to attend the office in line with Mastercard policy and team collaboration requirements.
Corporate Security Responsibility
All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information and networks carry inherent risk. Every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:
Follow Mastercard security policies and practices.
Protect the confidentiality and integrity of information.
Report suspected security incidents or breaches.
Complete all mandatory security training requirements.
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.