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
Lead Software Engineer
Overview:
Who is Mastercard?
Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realise their greatest potential.
Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.
Role Overview
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.
Position Responsibilities
As a Lead Software Engineer, you will:• 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
Ideal Candidate Qualifications:• 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
All About You• 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
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.