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.
Title and Summary
Principal Software Engineer
All About You
You are a top talent, result-oriented leader that is passionate about joining a like-minded team at Mastercard AI & Decision Product Enablement (DPE). You thrive on solving complex engineering challenges at scale and have experience building high-speed streaming platforms or distributed systems at hyper-scaler-level performance, AI&DPE is where you can make an outsized impact.
• You want to be part of the team leading innovation at Mastercard and across the globe: Join us and be at the forefront of defining the next generation of our decision platform, handling billions of transactions daily, with stringent reliability and security requirements and 99.999% availability.• You want to make an impact at hyper scale: Build systems that protect and enable customers across a global network, with reliability and performance at enterprise scale. • You are experienced at streaming first architecture: Help evolve our high throughput, low latency data streams and decisioning pipelines as we advance Axon based streaming across the platform. • Your resume and experience shows a track-record of real, proven outcomes for real users: Ship capabilities that drive smarter, faster decisions-from real-time authorization to AI driven enrichment-powering both internal and market facing products. • You are a leader and will be part of growing and fostering our engineering excellence culture: Define opinionated frameworks, rigorous resiliency, and a builder mindset, supported by transparent roadmaps and product council governance.• You thrive in a collaborative culture: Collaborate with world-class engineers and data scientists to deploy AI models through fully automated pipelines, accelerate model ops, and pioneer agentic AI capabilities.
Role Overview
As the 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.
Key Responsibilities
Enterprise Architecture & Technical Leadership• Lead architectural design for complex, enterprise-wide initiatives spanning multiple services and programs.• Define and evolve service interactions, dependency models, and policies to ensure scalability, security, and resilience.• Partner with business and product leaders to architect and deliver new services that enable innovative products and bundles.
Customer Experience & Platform Strategy• Own and improve the end-to-end customer experience across a portfolio of services and applications.• Simplify and optimize architecture strategies to balance cost, performance, and business value.• Apply judgment and experience to make trade-offs between competing priorities and technical constraints.
Thought Leadership & Influence• Drive organization-wide initiatives to advance software engineering craftsmanship and best practices.• Represent the organization through public speaking engagements, technical blogs, and white papers on emerging technologies.• Participate in Principal-level architecture reviews and resolve enterprise-wide technical and regulatory challenges.
Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing• Consult across teams and organizational boundaries to identify synergies, reuse opportunities, and eliminate silos.• Mentor engineers at all levels, fostering technical growth and leadership.• Promote knowledge sharing within guilds and programs to accelerate innovation and productivity.
Talent & Culture• Conduct technical interviews to raise the performance bar and attract top talent.• Provide unbiased recommendations for promotions based on demonstrated accomplishments.• Champion behaviors that align with organizational values and drive a culture of excellence.
Technical Domain Leadership (Experience in One or More Areas Required)
This role benefits from deep expertise in one or more critical technical domains that underpin Mastercard's real-time decisioning platforms. Candidates are not expected to be experts in all areas, but should demonstrate strong leadership and hands-on experience in several of the following:• Data Architecture & Strategy
o Focus on designing modern, scalable, governed data ecosystems.
o Data strategy and product-aligned data architectures
o Modern database technologies and migration away from legacy Oracle
o Data lakehouse architectures supporting analytics and ML workloads
o Feature catalog / feature engineering platforms• High-Throughput, Low-Latency, and Real-Time Systems
o Critical for Mastercard's real-time decisioning and event-driven platforms.
o Event streaming and high-throughput data pipelines
o Low-latency data technologies (distributed caches, grid replacement)
o Real-time transaction processing and sub-second decisioning
o Rules engine design and modernization• Cloud Infrastructure, Platform Engineering & DevOps
o Driving cloud-native engineering practices and operational excellence.
o AWS infrastructure engineering and cloud-native platform patterns
o DevOps and platform engineering (automation, CI/CD, observability, GitOps)
o ML lifecycle engineering (model training, deployment, refresh, inference)
Qualifications• Extensive experience in designing and delivering large-scale, distributed systems and platforms.• Proven ability to influence technical strategy and drive architectural decisions across multiple teams.• Strong expertise in modern software engineering practices, cloud-native architectures, and AI/data platforms.• Exceptional communication and leadership skills with a track record of mentoring and thought leadership.
Required Education• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.• Preferred: Advanced degree (Master's or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field for candidates with deep architectural and leadership responsibilities.
Required Years of Experience• Deep, progressive experience in software engineering.• Proven technical leadership roles influencing architecture and design across multiple teams.• Proven track record of delivering large-scale, distributed systems and enterprise-grade platforms.• Telecommuting and/or working from home may be permissible pursuant to company policies.
Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact [email protected] and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.
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.

In line with Mastercard's total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in the US, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive base salary and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. The base salary offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including but not limited to location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Mastercard benefits for full time (and certain part time) employees generally include: insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance); flexible spending account and health savings account; paid leaves (including 16 weeks of new parent leave and up to 20 days of bereavement leave); 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time, 25 days of vacation time and 5 personal days, pro-rated based on date of hire; 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays; 401k with a best-in-class company match; deferred compensation for eligible roles; fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities; eligibility for tuition reimbursement; and many more. Mastercard benefits for interns generally include: 56 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time; jury duty leave; and on-site fitness facilities in some locations.
Pay Ranges
O'Fallon, Missouri: $170,000 - $281,000 USD