Senior Principal, Software Engineering

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
Senior Principal, Software Engineering
Overview
Mastercard is looking for a talented Senior Principal, Software Engineering to join the Mastercard Foundry Research and Development team at our Dublin Tech Hub. In this role, you will be an established technical expert and thought leader, helping shape and deliver complex, enterprise-scale software solutions across products, services, and platforms.
You will provide deep technical leadership as an individual contributor, influencing architecture, design, development, testing, deployment, and operational excellence across complex systems. You will partner closely with business, product, engineering, architecture, and technology stakeholders to translate strategic objectives into scalable, secure, resilient, and high-quality software solutions.
Responsibilities
* Serve as an established expert and thought leader in Software Engineering, applying deep technical expertise to solve complex problems and drive achievement of key goals and initiatives.
* Lead the design and delivery of complex software solutions spanning multiple services, applications, or programs, ensuring alignment with business needs and organizational standards.
* Translate complex functional and non-functional requirements into scalable, secure, resilient, and maintainable software designs.
* Drive architectural decisions and technical design discussions across teams, ensuring solutions align with long-term platform vision, enterprise standards, and future scalability.
* Partner with business and product owners to architect and deliver new services, products, and capabilities that create customer and business value.
* Estimate, plan, and own delivery of engineering work across design, development, testing, deployment, configuration, documentation, and operational readiness.
* Review design, code, test, and deployment artifacts to uphold high standards of correctness, quality, security, performance, and maintainability.
* Proactively diagnose and resolve complex production, security, customer-experience, and performance issues, using root-cause analysis and preventative improvements.
* Champion automation across build, deployment, testing, observability, and operational workflows to improve reliability, reduce manual effort, and accelerate delivery.
* Contribute to strategic technical decisions, influencing product direction, system architecture, engineering practices, and technology roadmaps.
* Drive adoption of Mastercard software engineering standards, secure coding practices, API standards, testing practices, and SDLC excellence.
* Identify opportunities to simplify architectures, reduce technical debt, improve cost efficiency, and increase reuse of common platforms, services, and libraries.
* Consult across teams and organizational boundaries to identify synergies, resolve enterprise-wide technical challenges, and promote consistent engineering practices.
* Contribute to Software Engineering guilds, architecture forums, technical communities, and other initiatives that grow global expertise and elevate engineering craftsmanship.
Experience
* Considered an established expert and thought leader in Software Engineering with a strong track record of technical impact as an individual contributor.
* Proven experience designing, developing, and delivering complex software solutions across large-scale, distributed, secure, and resilient systems.
* Demonstrated ability to lead global or cross-functional technical initiatives involving technology, engineering, architecture, product, or business teams.
* Deep experience with modern software engineering practices, SDLC excellence, secure coding standards, code review, testing strategies, and operational readiness.
* Progressively grown career with proven design and development experience in multiple languages, software frameworks, secure coding standards, and vulnerability management.
* Expert understanding of architecture patterns, application design, APIs, microservices, integration patterns, event-driven architectures, and modern software delivery approaches.
* Experience translating complex business and functional requirements into clear technical strategies, designs, and implementation plans.
* Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, automation, observability, reliability, scalability, and performance engineering practices.
* Ability to drive trade-off discussions and balance competing priorities such as regulatory requirements, security, business value, customer experience, technical debt, and delivery timelines.
* Experience improving engineering productivity, quality, operational metrics, and developer experience across areas of technical ownership.
* Ability to succinctly articulate complex architecture patterns, technical risks, business implications, and recommendations to senior stakeholders.
* Experience contributing to engineering communities, architecture councils, guild initiatives, technical blogs, white papers, patents, or speaking engagements is preferred.
* Experience in setting up test environments that simulate production, including high availability, monitoring, automation, and ephemeral architecture to reduce run costs.
All About You
The ideal candidate for this position should have:
* Loves creating innovative products and technology solutions in a collaborative environment.
* Deep technical expertise in modern software engineering concepts, architecture, design, development, testing, automation, and operational excellence.
* Strong individual-contributor leadership skills with the ability to influence without direct authority across teams, functions, and geographies.
* Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and resolve complex technical challenges.
* Ability to quickly learn, evaluate, and apply new technologies, frameworks, patterns, and tools.
* Experience partnering with product, business, architecture, and engineering teams to build solutions that create customer and business value.
* Ability to support multiple concurrent initiatives while maintaining focus on quality, security, scalability, and delivery outcomes.
* Strong communication skills — both verbal and written — with the ability to explain complex technical subjects clearly and succinctly.
* Skilled at explaining technical problems, architecture decisions, trade-offs, and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
* Passionate about mentoring engineers, raising the engineering bar, and building a culture of continuous learning and craftsmanship.
* Comfortable representing technical strategy and progress in senior-level forums, architecture reviews, and cross-functional discussions.
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.