Lead Software Engineer, Mastercard
Office located in Mountain View
Global payments technology company
Open for applications
Global payments technology company
1001+ employees
Open for applications
Office located in Mountain View
1001+ employees
Company mission
To connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible.
Role
Who you are
- Strong software engineering experience building scalable, secure, maintainable production systems, including experience leading complex technical initiatives end to end
- Hands-on experience building and shipping AI-powered products or agentic applications using LLMs, orchestration frameworks, tool-calling patterns, retrieval, and context-aware workflows
- Strong understanding of agentic system design, including planning, reasoning loops, workflow orchestration, memory, grounding, evaluation, safety, and human-in-the-loop controls
- Experience taking AI solutions from prototype to production with sound engineering discipline around reliability, observability, latency, cost, security, and governance
- Experience with modern AI frameworks, SDKs, and tooling for building AI applications, agent workflows, and developer productivity use cases
- Strong programming skills in one or more backend languages such as Java or Python, with the ability to write high-quality, well-tested, production-ready code
- Experience with modern front-end frameworks such as React and/or Next.js for building intuitive product experiences would be beneficial
- Experience building services in cloud-native environments using Kubernetes and managed cloud services on AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Good understanding of APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, and integration patterns across enterprise platforms
- Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, DevSecOps, and engineering automation, including the ability to improve SDLC efficiency and release quality using AI tools
- Practical experience using AI coding and engineering assistants to improve productivity across design, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and operational support
- Strong background in software security, including authentication, authorisation, secrets management, encryption, threat modelling, and secure deployment practices for AI-enabled systems
- Proven ability to create reusable platforms, frameworks, or internal engineering capabilities that improve developer experience and accelerate delivery across teams
- Strong product mindset with the ability to translate user needs and business goals into practical, high-impact technical solutions
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with experience influencing across engineering, product, data science, and leadership stakeholders
- You are a hands-on technical leader who enjoys building and shipping real products, not just prototypes
- You have experience building or operating AI-enabled or agentic applications in production and understand what it takes to make them secure, reliable, and useful at scale
- You combine strong software engineering fundamentals with curiosity and good judgment in applying emerging AI capabilities to real business problems
- You actively use AI to enhance your own engineering productivity and help teams adopt better ways of designing, coding, testing, documenting, and operating software
- You understand where AI can accelerate delivery and where human review, engineering discipline, and thoughtful controls remain essential
- You care deeply about customer value, developer experience, quality, resilience, and long-term maintainability
- You are comfortable working in collaborative, cross-functional, and internationally distributed teams
- You raise the bar for others through mentorship, technical leadership, and a practical, delivery-focused mindset
- You communicate complex technical concepts clearly and effectively to both engineering teams and senior stakeholders Corporate Security Responsibility
What the job involves
- The CNPF Data & AI organisation is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to help build the next generation of intelligent, agentic products and platforms powering the Mastercard Virtual C-Suite. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an experienced engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with practical experience building production-ready AI systems
- You will lead the design and delivery of secure, scalable, and reliable agentic applications that can reason, orchestrate tools, interact with enterprise systems, and deliver measurable business value. You will work closely with Applied AI, Data Science, Product, Security, and Platform teams to move from concept to experimentation to governed production deployment
- Lead hands-on architecture, design, and implementation of agentic applications, AI-powered services, and platform capabilities from concept through production
- Define engineering patterns and best practices for production AI systems, including evaluation, monitoring, guardrails, resiliency, cost control, and rollback strategies
- Drive end-to-end software delivery across the SDLC, from discovery and prototyping to testing, release, and production operations
- Use engineering tools to accelerate design, coding, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, and delivery while maintaining strong engineering judgment and code quality standards
- Champion an AI-enabled SDLC by improving developer workflows, automation, test generation, code review quality, release confidence, and team productivity
- Partner closely with Product, Applied AI, Data Science, and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous opportunities into scalable product capabilities
- Provide technical leadership through architectural decisions, design reviews, code reviews, hands-on contribution, and mentoring of engineers across the team
- Build highly available, secure, and maintainable cloud-native services with strong observability, performance, and operational readiness
- Shape technical roadmaps, identify short- and long-term platform needs, and influence architecture choices that enable scale, reuse, and faster delivery
- Collaborate across teams and business units to solve complex business and engineering problems with practical, high-impact solution
- Keep senior stakeholders informed of progress, risks, trade-offs, and implementation decisions in a clear and concise manner
Our take
Mastercard is in the global payments business, and operates the world's fastest payments processing network. Its products and solutions have become central to everyday commerce across the world, in activities ranging from shopping and travelling to running businesses.
As the economy has become more and more digitized, Mastercard has been a leading player in helping businesses and individuals across the globe embrace card payments and digital banking. One of the world's largest companies, its revenue has seen consistent gain in the last 20 years.
The challenge for modern payments companies is that payments are always changing, as seen in the astronomical rise of contactless payments over the last decade. Mastercard's acquisition of blockchain systems, and an overall focus on leveraging its technology towards a digital economy, has placed the company in good stead to keep up to date with current trends, like cryptocurrency, in the digitized payments world.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
21% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Purchase, Harrison, NY
Leadership
Michael Miebach
(CEO)Michael has served in a variety of roles at the company, including President and CPO. They are currently a Board Member at IBM, Accion, the World Resources Institute, the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, and the Metropolitan Opera. They are also a Trustee of USCIB.
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