Principal Engineer – Application 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 Engineer – Application Architect
Who is Mastercard?
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
Payments Network Technology is seeking a Principal Engineer to provide technical and delivery leadership across payment-network initiatives. This role will connect architecture, release coordination, dependency management, and engineering execution across multiple teams.
Roles and Responsibilities
• Define and evolve architecture for secure, scalable, and highly available payment-network services.
• Coordinate technical delivery across teams, including releases, dependencies, defect triage, and resolution of cross-cutting issues.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to translate business needs into architecture and implementation direction.
• Lead design reviews and drive decisions on APIs, service interactions, data, resiliency, security, and operational readiness.
• Identify reuse opportunities and promote common engineering patterns and standards.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads across teams.
• Communicate architecture trade-offs, delivery risks, and recommendations to senior stakeholders.
• Provide technical or product leadership, mentor team members, and drive decisions across multiple workstreams.
Essential Skills
• Extensive software architecture and development experience in large-scale systems.
• Deep knowledge of Java, Spring Boot, microservices, REST APIs, messaging, event-driven architecture, SQL/NoSQL, and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with secure engineering, DevOps, performance, resiliency, observability, and production-readiness practices.
• Ability to lead through influence across organizational boundaries.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
All About You
• Experience working in Agile delivery environments and across the software development lifecycle.
• Clear communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Ability to work with globally distributed product, engineering, architecture, operations, and business teams.
• Experience leading SOAR (Solution Architecture Review) and driving technical strategy, architecture alignment, engineering excellence, and risk management across multiple teams.
• Experience creating and reviewing TADs (Technical Architecture Documents) for large-scale distributed systems, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards, security requirements, resiliency objectives, and long-term maintainability.
• Demonstrated experience defining and governing cross-platform architecture, enabling interoperability, reuse, standardization, and consistent engineering practices across multiple products and services.
• Experience designing and implementing multi-region resiliency architectures, including active-active and active-passive deployment patterns, disaster recovery strategies, cross-region data replication, failover mechanisms, and business continuity solutions.
• Strong understanding of distributed data management, including data replication, consistency models, recovery objectives, and operational considerations across geographic regions.
• Champions operability and maintainability as first-class design principles, ensuring observability, monitoring, automation, self-healing capabilities, supportability, and simplified operational management are built into solutions from inception.
• Deep understanding of Mastercard Engineering Principles (or equivalent large-scale enterprise engineering standards) and a proven ability to apply them consistently across architecture, software design, deployment, resiliency, security, and operational practices.
• Demonstrated ability to balance architecture, business priorities, scalability, security, resiliency, and operational considerations while establishing technology direction for multiple engineering teams.
• Experience defining architecture guardrails, engineering standards, reference implementations, and reusable patterns that improve consistency, quality, and delivery effectiveness across the organization.
• Strong knowledge of reliability engineering practices, including service-level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, observability, fault isolation, disaster recovery testing, and continuous resilience validation.
• Payments or financial-services domain knowledge is preferred.
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.