Principal Software Engineer

Mastercard•Chicago, IL

1d•Remote

About The Position

As a Principal Engineer within the Decision Stream program, you will combine enterprise-scale technical leadership with hands-on engineering for the next-generation Decision Management Platform. This is not a strategy-only role. You will actively design, code, prototype, and validate core platform capabilities, using modern AI-assisted development tools as part of day-to-day software engineering to move faster, improve quality, and help teams adopt better ways of building. Key areas of focus include leveraging disruptive technologies in real-time AI inferencing and decisioning to improve product effectiveness, increase business delivery, strengthen technical resilience, and lower cost of ownership. You will work closely with technology executives, senior leaders, and engineers to shape the overall AI & DPE technology strategy.

Requirements

Extensive experience in software engineering and technical leadership
Proven delivery of large-scale distributed systems
Expertise in cloud, AI/data platforms, and modern engineering practices
Strong communication and mentorship skills
Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent); advanced degree preferred
Data architectures for decisioning: lakehouses, delta lakes, distributed logs, and product-aligned data models.
Feature catalogs and engineering platforms for reusable, governed features that can be defined, discovered, validated, and served across batch and real-time decisioning.
Decisioning data models covering events, derived features, reference data, labels, outcomes, and policy data consumed by rules, models, and agentic workflows.
Data contracts, lineage, freshness, and quality controls that keep decisioning data trustworthy, explainable, and production ready.
Event streaming and high-throughput data pipelines.
Low-latency data technologies -distributed caches, in-memory data grids.
Real-time transaction processing and sub-second decisioning.
ML lifecycle engineering: model training, deployment, refresh, and low-latency inference.
Agentic AI patterns, LLM integration, and prompt engineering applied to platform and product problems.
Model observability, drift detection, and feedback loops that keep AI systems reliable in production.
Authoring, testing, and deployment of business rules engine rules and similar decisioning logic.
Tooling that helps authors validate rules, models, and policies pre-deployment.
Operator experience for authors, analysts, and SREs: lifecycle, approvals, observability, and explainability of live decisions.
Rules engine design and modernization.
AWS infrastructure engineering and cloud-native platform patterns.
DevOps and platform engineering -automation, CI/CD, observability, GitOps.

Nice To Haves

You are an awesome engineer and leader who is passionate about joining a like-minded team at Mastercard AI & Decision Product Enablement.
You thrive on solving complex engineering challenges at scale and have experience building high-speed streaming platforms or distributed systems at hyperscaler-level performance.
AI-native engineer — uses AI-assisted development as default
Innovation leader — builds systems at massive scale and availability
Streaming-first mindset — experience with low-latency pipelines
Proven outcomes — delivers impactful, production-ready systems
Engineering culture champion — drives best practices and transparency
Collaborative — works across engineering and data science teams

Responsibilities

Build software, tooling, and platform capabilities.
Design and implement large scale distributed systems.
Develop reusable services, patterns, and integrations.
Contribute to new product and prototype development from concept through validation.
Evaluate systems, frameworks, and tools across quality, cost, latency, scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
Apply sound engineering judgment to trade-offs in distributed systems design and architecture.
Apply AI tools as part of daily engineering practice to real product and platform problems.
Teach and model the adoption of AI-assisted development, modern languages, and current engineering practices.
Improve developer experience through automation, AI-assisted workflows, and platform thinking.
Advocate learnings, prototypes, and best practices across the organization.
Own and improve 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.
Lead architectural design for complex, enterprise-wide initiatives spanning multiple services and programs.
Drive organization-wide initiatives to advance software engineering craftsmanship and best pratices.
Represent the organization through public speaking, technical blogs, and white papers on emerging technologies.
Participate in Principle-level architecture reviews and resolve enterprise-wide technical and regulatory challenges.
Mentor engineers at all levels, fostering technical growth and leadership.
Conduct technical interviews to raise the performance bar and attract top talent.
Provide unbiased, accomplishment-based recommendations for promotions.
Champion AI-assisted engineering as a default working practice and align it with organizational values.

Benefits

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