Principal Software Engineer

Mastercard is a global payments technology company that supports secure, simple, and accessible digital payments worldwide. The Principal Software Engineer will shape technical architectures, reusable patterns, and engineering approaches for strategic initiatives within the Security Solutions Organization. The role involves cross-functional collaboration, hands-on prototyping, AI-assisted coding, and influencing technical direction across product, engineering, data science, security, and platform teams.

Responsibilities:

• Define solution architectures, reusable patterns, and shared components across SSO initiatives
• Translate product and business needs into clear engineering concepts and architecture options
• Evaluate trade-offs across scalability, security, interoperability, and maintainability
• Identify connective architecture and reusable capabilities across products and platforms
• Apply strong PDLC experience to move initiatives from concept through validation to production readiness
• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to clarify technical requirements, dependencies, and risks
• Ensure architecture decisions account for real-world delivery, supportability, and platform evolution
• Build prototypes and proofs of concept to validate architecture assumptions and demonstrate feasibility
• Use AI-assisted coding to accelerate exploration and development
• Explore emerging technologies, with particular attention to agentic commerce, AI agents, non-network intelligence, modern APIs, and cloud-native platforms
• Distinguish prototype work from production-grade implementation while informing product and engineering direction
• Create clear architecture diagrams, technical narratives, and decision materials for varied audiences
• Present concepts and recommendations to engineers, product leaders, and senior stakeholders
• Drive cross-functional alignment and serve as a trusted technical advisor

Requirements:

• • Extensive experience designing, building, and supporting production software
• • Strong background as a software architect, principal engineer, or senior technical lead
• • Deep knowledge of modern architecture, APIs, distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and security
• • Strong PDLC experience across discovery, architecture, delivery, and production readiness
• • Hands-on experience building prototypes, proofs of concept, or reference implementations
• • Comfortable using AI-assisted coding tools to accelerate development and validation
• • Skilled at translating complex needs into practical technical approaches
• • Strong communicator across engineering, product, business, and executive audiences
• • Able to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority
• • Experience in payments, commerce, fraud, identity, cybersecurity, or trust platforms preferred
• • Experience with agentic commerce, AI agents, or generative AI is a strong plus