Principal Software Engineer, SE Guild

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 Software Engineer, SE Guild
Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.
OVERVIEW
The Software Engineering (SE) Guild is a global community of 8,000+ software engineers across Mastercard. The SE Guild exists to develop and share knowledge, standards, practices, and tooling, and to help elevate and maintain the craft of software engineering across the company.
The SE Guild's work is organized around four pillars:
* Help software engineers be better engineers
* Help software engineering leaders be better leaders
* Solve shared, hard problems through Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
* Build senior-level technical leadership through Principal Communities
ROLE
As a Principal Software Engineer supporting the SE Guild, you will be responsible for building and maintaining the technical solutions that enable SE Guild programs to scale reliably and deliver value across the engineering community.
This is a hands-on engineering role. This role requires a strong foundation in software engineering and the ability to engage credibly at the Principal Software Engineer level, including evaluating technical content, reviewing coding assessments, contributing to engineering discussions, and applying modern software engineering practices to Guild-supported programs.
While you will partner closely with SE Guild leadership, TPMs, and SIG leaders, success in this role is measured by the quality, reliability, and usability of the solutions and content you build.
The role is expected to stay connected to the engineering community through participation in Special Interest Groups (SIGs), technical discussions, and evaluation of emerging tools, technologies, and engineering practices. Successful candidates will have an interest in evaluating, prototyping, and helping scale solutions that improve the software engineering experience across Mastercard.
Over time, this role is expected to take on increasing technical ownership of SE Guild initiatives, based on experience, trust, and demonstrated impact.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
* Developer Experience & Community Insights
* Partner with engineers, SIG leaders, and technical communities to identify opportunities for alignment, education, collaboration, and knowledge sharing across the engineering community.
* Help surface common challenges, emerging needs, and opportunities for the SE Guild to better support software engineers and engineering leaders.
* Contribute to the Principals Community through active participation, technical leadership, knowledge sharing, and collaboration with senior engineers across the company.
* Workflow Automation
* Leverage emerging technologies, including automation, AI-enabled tooling, and agents, where appropriate to improve scalability, reduce manual effort, and enhance SE Guild productivity (e.g., roster management, document publishing, reporting).
* Design, implement, and maintain reliable datasets, integrations, and data pipelines that support SE Guild programs and operational needs.
* Apply engineering discipline to data quality, including validation, reconciliation, and monitoring mechanisms that prevent silent failures.
* Continuously identify opportunities to simplify and improve Guild workflows through technical solutions.
* Technical Learning Assets & Engineering Curriculum
* Develop, test, and maintain technical learning assets that support SE Guild programs, including documentation, workshops, labs, exercises, and reference materials.
* Ensure content is technically accurate, aligned with Mastercard engineering standards, and practical for real-world use.
* Partner with TPMs, SIG leaders, senior engineers, and Learning & Development to validate content and incorporate feedback.
* Coding Assessments & Interview Content
* Develop, configure, and maintain coding test content used in SE Guild-supported hiring.
* Validate end-to-end behavior of coding tests, including interviewer vs. candidate experience, expected outputs, and hidden test behavior.
* Build templates (question selection, language options, interviewer notes) to improve consistency and reduce setup friction.
* Establish and maintain quality mechanisms, including review cadence, testing, calibration, reporting, and refresh strategies.
ALL ABOUT YOU
The ideal candidate has:
* Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.
* Demonstrated progression from Software Engineer to senior technical leadership roles, with a strong foundation in hands-on software development.
* Hands-on experience designing, building, and evolving large-scale, distributed, cloud-native systems using modern programming languages (e.g., Java, .NET/C#, Python).
* Strong expertise in microservices, APIs, and event-driven architectures, with a focus on scalability, resiliency, and security.
* Proven experience designing and operating solutions on major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), including production-grade system design.
* Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and operational excellence for highly available production systems.
* Solid foundation in data and storage technologies, including relational and non-relational databases, with an emphasis on performance, reliability, and scalability.
* Experience with PCF, Oracle, Redis, Splunk, Netscout, Dynatrace, and related enterprise tools.
* Extensive experience delivering enterprise-grade, secure software solutions, preferably within regulated or financial services environments.
* Curiosity for emerging technologies, tools, and engineering practices, with an interest in evaluating and prototyping solutions that may benefit the engineering community.
Nice to Have
* Experience creating or maintaining technical learning assets such as documentation, best practices, training materials, workshops, labs, exercises, or reference implementations, with a focus on correctness, usability, and practical application.
* Familiarity with interview/coding assessment platforms (e.g., CodeSignal) or structured question bank development, including calibration and content lifecycle.
* Experience working with data (querying, transforming, validating, troubleshooting data quality issues).
* Experience leveraging AI-enabled tooling, agents, or workflow automation to improve productivity, documentation, learning experiences, content creation, 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.