Lead 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
Lead Software Engineer
Position Overview
The Business Experimentation and Optimization (BE&O) teams within Mastercard's Services organization are building industry-leading software that empowers business users around the world to make data-driven decisions through advanced analytics and experimentation. As we expand our product offerings and modernize our technology stack, we are reimagining how we deliver scalable, cloud-native solutions to our clients.
We are seeking a hands-on, technically strong Lead Software Engineer to drive the architecture, design, and development of our next-generation experimentation platform. In this role, you will help define and evolve system architecture and non-functional requirements-such as scalability, performance, security, and reliability-ensuring our solutions meet the highest engineering standards. As a technical leader, you will guide cross-functional teams in building scalable services, APIs, and analytical capabilities that power our platform, leveraging technologies like Databricks and cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure. You will collaborate closely with your immediate team and partner with other development teams across programs to align on shared goals, define cross-cutting initiatives, and deliver cohesive, enterprise-grade solutions. You will also mentor engineers, work across global time zones, and champion engineering excellence through best practices in software development, observability, and continuous delivery.
Our teams are small, agile, and empowered to choose the processes that work best for their goals. Every engineer contributes to the full development lifecycle-from ideation and design to implementation and testing-fostering a culture of ownership, innovation, and continuous improvement.
Position Responsibilities:
At Mastercard Services, you will serve as a senior technical leader and hands-on engineer for BE&O's next-generation experimentation and analytics platform. As a Lead Software Engineer, you will lead through technical influence, architectural judgment, and execution excellence to help modernize our platform and deliver scalable, secure, cloud-native capabilities for global business users.
Lead the technical design and delivery of complex, data-intensive software solutions that enable advanced analytics, experimentation, and data-driven decisioning for Mastercard clients.
Define and drive technical strategy for modernization initiatives, including evolution of legacy systems toward scalable, cloud-native, API-driven, and service-oriented architectures.
Lead system design across multiple levels of detail, including platform architecture, high-level design, detailed technical design, integration patterns, non-functional requirements, and implementation approach.
Serve as a hands-on technical contributor, designing, coding, testing, debugging, and delivering production-quality software across the full engineering lifecycle.
Build and evolve scalable services, APIs, data pipelines, and analytical capabilities using modern engineering practices, cloud platforms, and data technologies such as AWS, Azure, Databricks, Spark/PySpark, and related frameworks.
Partner closely with product managers, engineering teams, architects, data scientists, QA, security, and operations teams to translate business and functional requirements into robust technical solutions.
Coordinate and lead technical execution across globally distributed engineering teams, ensuring alignment across regions, time zones, dependencies, design decisions, and delivery milestones.
Drive architecture and design reviews, code reviews, technical decision-making, and engineering tradeoff discussions to ensure solutions are secure, resilient, observable, performant, maintainable, and aligned with enterprise standards.
Identify opportunities to improve platform scalability, reliability, developer productivity, operational readiness, and speed of delivery through modernization, automation, reusable patterns, and engineering best practices.
Provide technical mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers through design guidance, code review, pairing, knowledge sharing, and modeling strong engineering judgment.
Navigate ambiguity in complex initiatives by clarifying technical direction, decomposing large problems, identifying risks, and driving alignment across stakeholders.
Champion a culture of engineering excellence, continuous improvement, ownership, collaboration, and high-quality delivery across the team and partner organizations.
Ideal Candidate Qualifications:
8+ years of software engineering experience delivering scalable, high-performance, and reliable software in an agile environment.
Strong hands-on experience designing and building distributed systems, microservices, RESTful APIs, and cloud-native applications.
Strong experience with data-intensive applications and analytics platforms; experience with Databricks, Spark, or PySpark is highly desirable.
Proven expertise leading system architecture, high-level design, detailed design, and end-to-end technical delivery of complex software solutions.
Experience driving technology modernization initiatives, including cloud adoption, platform transformation, and modernization of legacy applications.
Hands-on experience with AWS and/or Azure, CI/CD, containerization, Kubernetes, observability, and modern software delivery practices.
Demonstrated technical leadership as an individual contributor, influencing architecture decisions, driving technical strategy, and leading large cross-team initiatives.
Ability to translate business and product requirements into scalable, secure, and maintainable technical solutions.
Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with a proven ability to work effectively across engineering, product, architecture, data science, QA, and operations teams.
Experience leading and coordinating technical initiatives across globally distributed teams spanning multiple regions and time zones.
Passion for mentoring and developing engineers through technical guidance, design reviews, and knowledge sharing.
Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to work through ambiguity, make sound technical decisions, and drive results through hands-on execution.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field; advanced degree is a plus.
Mastercard is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity and inclusion. Applicants will be considered and treated without regard to gender, gender identity, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, veteran or disabled status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
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.