Principal Software Engineer

Mastercard•O'fallon, MO

16d•$170,000 - $281,000•Onsite

About The Position

Mastercard is a global technology company powering an inclusive digital economy. Through secure networks, data-driven insights, and innovative solutions, we enable safe, simple, and smart digital commerce across more than 210 countries and territories. Within Consumer Authentication Solutions (CAS), Mastercard delivers the critical authentication infrastructure that protects billions of digital transactions globally. CAS provides capabilities including EMV 3DS, Identity Check, Directory Services, Smart Authentication, tokenized authentication, issuer enablement, and risk-based authentication. As a Principal Software Engineer, you serve as a distinguished technical leader responsible for shaping the architecture, engineering strategy, and long-term technical direction of critical authentication platforms. You drive solutions to complex business and technical challenges, influence engineering decisions across multiple teams, and establish standards that improve the scalability, resiliency, security, and operational excellence of Mastercard's authentication ecosystem. This role requires deep technical expertise, exceptional system design skills, and the ability to lead through influence while mentoring engineers and advancing engineering excellence across the organization. Consistent with Principal SDE expectations, you are recognized as a technical authority, a trusted advisor, and a driver of innovation across large-scale initiatives.

Requirements

Recognized technical expert with a proven track record leading large-scale software engineering initiatives.
Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture, microservices, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and enterprise application development.
Advanced experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant, and globally distributed systems.
Strong hands-on experience with Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, gRPC, and modern application frameworks.
Experience building cloud-native platforms utilizing Kubernetes, Docker, and enterprise cloud technologies.
Expertise with event-driven architectures and messaging technologies such as Kafka, NATS, and MQ.
Strong understanding of performance engineering, system scalability, reliability patterns, and resiliency design.
Experience implementing secure software development practices and enterprise-grade security controls.
Deep understanding of observability, monitoring, incident management, disaster recovery, and operational excellence.
Proven ability to lead large, complex engineering efforts involving multiple teams, stakeholders, and business functions.
Skilled at driving consensus and influencing technical decisions without direct authority.
Highly regarded mentor and advisor with a demonstrated commitment to developing engineering talent.
Excellent communicator capable of translating complex technical concepts for engineering, business, and executive audiences.
Maintains awareness of emerging technologies, industry trends, and engineering best practices, applying them to create business value.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field.

Nice To Haves

Experience within payments, fintech, digital identity, authentication, or high-scale transaction processing environments is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the long-term technical vision for critical authentication and identity platforms.
Lead the architecture and design of highly scalable, resilient, distributed systems supporting global payment authentication services.
Establish engineering standards, reference architectures, design patterns, and best practices across multiple product and platform teams.
Make strategic technology decisions balancing performance, resiliency, security, maintainability, operational excellence, and speed to market.
Identify and solve complex technical challenges that span organizational and architectural boundaries.
Drive architectural evolution toward cloud-native, event-driven, and service-oriented solutions.
Maintain meaningful hands-on involvement while leading large technical initiatives and critical architectural efforts.
Champion high-quality software engineering practices, code quality, automation, observability, and operational readiness.
Lead design reviews for major programs and provide guidance on technical tradeoffs, risk mitigation, and implementation approaches.
Ensure solutions are built with reliability, compliance, security, and scalability as foundational principles.
Drive adoption of modern engineering practices including CI/CD, automation-first operations, and resilience engineering.
Influence technical direction across multiple teams and business initiatives.
Partner closely with Product, Architecture, Security, Engineering, SRE, and Operational leaders to align technology strategy with business objectives.
Serve as a trusted advisor for large-scale programs and enterprise-level initiatives.
Foster collaboration across teams and drive consensus on complex technical decisions.
Represent engineering strategy and architectural recommendations to senior leadership and executive stakeholders.
Provide technical mentorship to senior engineers, lead engineers, and engineering leaders.
Raise engineering capability across the organization through coaching, design guidance, and technical leadership.
Promote a culture of innovation, collaboration, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence.
Contribute significantly to onboarding, knowledge sharing, and development of technical talent.

Benefits

insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance)
flexible spending account and health savings account
16 weeks of new parent leave
up to 20 days of bereavement leave
80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time
25 days of vacation time
5 personal days
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