Senior Software Engineer (SRE) - Performance Engineering

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
Senior Software Engineer (SRE) - Performance Engineering
Are you passionate about optimizing high-scale payment systems? 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.
If you're energized by performance challenges in real-time digital commerce, we'd love to meet you.
Responsibilities
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.
Qualifications
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.
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.