Lead 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

Lead Software Engineer

Overview:
The Portfolio Intelligence team within Mastercard Services organization is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to play a critical role in advancing the Mastercard Intelligence Center, the organization’s flagship business intelligence platform. This role emphasizes technical leadership in design and architecture to support the platform’s continued growth and scalability. The Lead Software Engineer will operate as a hands on technical contributor, collaborating with multiple scrum teams to design, build, deploy, and scale real time, interactive applications used by global clients.
The role provides direct technical leadership through architectural decision making, design and code reviews, hands on code contributions, and the establishment of engineering standards. It also includes mentoring engineers, guiding the platform’s evolution toward modern technologies and AI driven capabilities, and promoting a culture of innovation, engineering excellence, and continuous improvement.
This is a hybrid position based in Arlington, VA, requiring three days per week onsite.

Role:
• Provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams by influencing architecture, design decisions, and long-term platform strategy.
• Lead the design and development of large-scale, cross-functional initiatives with meaningful business impact.
• Act as a hands-on individual contributor who tackles complex engineering challenges across front-end and back-end systems.
• Define and guide architectural standards aligned with security, scalability, and performance requirements.
• Contribute to the development of agentic AI capabilities as part of ongoing platform innovation.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and collaborative problem-solving.
• Improve and maintain CI/CD pipelines to support reliable and efficient development and deployment workflows.
• Drive automation and high-quality release practices to ensure stable and predictable production deployments.
• Enhance system observability and monitoring through dashboards, alerts, metrics, and log analysis using tools such as Splunk and Dynatrace.
• Lead incident resolution, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis (RCA) to strengthen platform stability and resilience.
• Partner with product, business, and technical stakeholders to identify opportunities, define scope, and assess value and impact.
• Collaborate with Program and Project Managers to estimate work, manage risks and dependencies, and track engineering metrics.
• Coordinate effectively with global and offshore teams while maintaining strong documentation, traceability, and SDLC standards.
• Continuously improve engineering processes, coding standards, and architectural best practices across teams.

All About You:
• Demonstrated progression in software engineering roles with increasing technical leadership and system ownership.
• Strong hands-on experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems.
• Expertise in modern programming languages such as Java, .NET/C#, or Python.
• Strong knowledge of microservices architecture, API design, and event-driven systems.
• Familiarity with distributed system patterns including idempotency, retries, circuit breaking, and backpressure.
• Experience working with cloud-native technologies and enterprise platforms, including: Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, Splunk, Dynatrace.
• Experience developing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins).
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Experience working with AI-driven systems or agentic architectures (e.g., LLM integrations, AI-enabled automation, or intelligent agents) is a strong plus
• Strong decision-making skills related to technology evaluation, architecture, and framework selection.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to clearly explain technical tradeoffs, business value, and ROI.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.

This role is not eligible for Mastercard’s work authorization sponsorship. As such, candidates must be eligible to work in the United States, now as well as in the future, without employer sponsorship.

#LI-NF1

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 reasonable_accommodation@mastercard.com 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

Arlington, Virginia: $161,000 - $266,000 USD