Senior Software Engineer, Mastercard
Site Reliability Engineer, Performance Engineering
Global payments technology company
Be an early applicant
Global payments technology company
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
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
- Are you passionate about optimizing high‑scale payment systems?
- If you’re energized by performance challenges in real‑time digital commerce, we’d love to meet you
- 5+ years of relevant experience in performance engineering, backend engineering, or distributed systems work
- Strong expertise in distributed systems, real‑time services, and high‑scale, low‑latency architectures
- Deep understanding of networking, concurrency, caching, replication, data structures, and scaling patterns
- Proven track record of diagnosing, profiling, and improving performance in large-scale production environments
- Hands-on experience with performance testing and analysis tools, such as:
- Load testing: JMeter, Gatling, Locust, k6
- Profilers: YourKit, JProfiler, async-profiler, perf, FlameGraphs
- Monitoring/Observability: Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, New Relic, DataDog, Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry
- Distributed tracing: Jaeger, Zipkin
- Practical experience with cloud-native systems (Kubernetes, service mesh, autoscaling, API gateways, CI/CD)
- Strong skills in Java, JVM tuning, and performance optimization (or similar high-performance languages)
- Familiarity with message queues, caches, and storage systems such as Kafka, Redis, Hazelcast, Cassandra, or Aurora/RDS
- Ability to influence technical direction without authority, mentor engineers, and drive performance best practices across teams
- Comfortable working in mission-critical, high-availability environments, ideally involving payment gateways, REST APIs, or other latency-sensitive transactional systems
- Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
What the job involves
- Join us to drive performance for Mastercard Payment Gateway Services (MPGS), where millions of transactions flow daily through hosted checkout, REST APIs, wallet integrations, network tokenization, and fraud‑screening workflows
- You’ll analyze end‑to‑end latency across authorization flows, routing, risk checks, and multi‑region services while shaping the performance strategy for a global payment gateway
- You’ll build targeted load tests, simulate real merchant traffic, and help engineering teams deliver low‑latency, high‑throughput, resilient services
- Lead deep performance investigations across distributed, multi‑region payment services and real‑time transaction flows
- Analyze latency, throughput, saturation, and failure modes across data‑plane and control‑plane components
- Collaborate with platform, infrastructure, and networking teams to optimize runtimes, containers, APIs, and service‑to‑service communication
- Define performance standards, SLAs, benchmarks, and system‑level expectations for global payment traffic
- Mentor engineers and influence architecture and design decisions across multiple teams
- Build scalable, cost‑efficient performance testing frameworks that emulate real merchant traffic and diverse MPGS integration patterns
- Enhance observability and diagnostics to surface bottlenecks, hotspots, and performance degradation trends
- Partner with risk, security, and fraud teams to ensure added controls maintain throughput and low latency under load
- Drive continuous optimization initiatives to ensure low‑latency, high‑availability, high‑throughput payment processing
Application process
- End Date: March 7, 2026
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 digitised, 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 digitised payments world.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
21% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Gym membership
- Share purchase options
- Extra holiday purchase optional
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
Company HQ
Purchase, Harrison, NY
Leadership
Michael Miebach
(CEO)Has served in a variety of roles at the company, including President and CPO. Currently 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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