Sr. Principal 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
Sr. Principal Software Engineer
Role Overview
As a Sr. Principal Engineer in the AI & Data Platform Engineering organization, you will provide technology leadership and strategic influence across enterprise-scale initiatives for the next generation Decision Management Platform. With deep architectural expertise and ability to collaborate across the organization, you will have the ability to drive innovation and engineering excellence. Key areas of focus include leveraging disruptive technologies in the real time AI inferencing and decisioning domain to improve product effectiveness, increase business agility, increase technical resilience and scalability, and lower cost of ownership. You will work closely with the technology executive, senior leaders and engineers to play an important pivotal role in shaping the overall AI & DPE technology strategy for the wider AI & DPE team.
Key Responsibilities:
Enterprise Architecture & Technical Leadership• Lead architectural design for complex, enterprise-wide initiatives involving multiple services, programs, and high-scale decisioning workloads.• Define service interactions, data flows, dependency models, and architecture policies that ensure scalability, resiliency, and security.• Partner with business and product leaders to architect new services that enable innovative Mastercard products and decision capabilities.
Customer Experience & Platform Strategy• Improve the end-to-end experience of internal and external customers across services and applications.• Simplify and optimize architecture strategies to balance cost efficiency, performance, and functional requirements.• Apply expert-level technical judgment to guide trade-offs in large-scale design and implementation.
Thought Leadership & Influence• Drive engineering best practices, software craftsmanship, and architectural rigor across the organization.• Represent the engineering organization through technical presentations, publications, and internal knowledge-sharing sessions.• Participate in Principal-level architecture reviews and address complex enterprise-wide technical challenges.
Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing• Work across organizational boundaries to identify integration opportunities, reduce redundancy, and drive platform cohesion.• Mentor engineers and rising architects to elevate technical expertise and leadership within the organization.• Promote knowledge sharing across guilds, programs, and engineering communities.
Talent & Culture• Conduct deep technical interviews and help identify candidates who raise the engineering bar.• Champion behaviors that support a culture of excellence, inclusivity, and accountability.
Qualifications:• Extensive hands-on software engineering experience building and architecting distributed systems or real-time processing platforms.• Deep architectural expertise in large-scale, high-throughput systems, including end-to-end service design, data flows, and dependency modeling.• Strong experience with cloud and data platform technologies, real-time decisioning, and enterprise-grade system reliability and security.• Prior work integrating AI/ML or analytic models into production systems, especially for real-time or near real-time workloads.• Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical designs, influence cross-functional engineering teams, and guide platform-wide architectural decisions.• Strong problem-solving, communication, and technical leadership skills, with experience mentoring senior engineers.
Preferred Qualifications• Experience with high-volume transactional systems, business rules management platforms, or real-time streaming pipelines.• Background working with large in-memory data grids, rule engines, or decisioning engines.• Experience contributing to organizational standards, technical publications, or architecture communities of practice.• Prior work in environments involving regulated data, compliance constraints, or high-availability requirements.
#LI-TE1
Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact [email protected] and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.
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.

In line with Mastercard's total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in the US, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive base salary and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. The base salary offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including but not limited to location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Mastercard benefits for full time (and certain part time) employees generally include: 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; and many more. Mastercard benefits for interns generally include: 56 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time; jury duty leave; and on-site fitness facilities in some locations.
Pay Ranges
New York City, New York: $254,000 - $407,000 USD
Austin, Texas: $212,000 - $339,000 USD
Chicago, Illinois: $212,000 - $339,000 USD
O'Fallon, Missouri: $212,000 - $339,000 USD
Remote - Illinois: $212,000 - $339,000 USD
Remote - Washington: $212,000 - $339,000 USD
San Francisco, California: $254,000 - $407,000 USD
Job Posting Window
Posting windows may change based on the volume of applications received and business necessity. Candidates are encouraged to apply expeditiously.