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
About 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 realize 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.
About The Role
Cloud Infrastructure Engineers at Mastercard design, build, and operate the foundational platforms that enable our product and service teams to deliver securely, reliably, and at scale. This role focuses on Azure-based infrastructure, cloud-native services, and automation that power transaction processing, analytics, developer productivity, and self-service delivery across the enterprise.
As a Lead Software Engineer, you will operate as a senior individual contributor with broad technical ownership and influence that extends beyond a single team. You will drive the design and evolution of complex platform capabilities, set technical direction for key areas of cloud infrastructure, and partner closely with engineering, security, and operations leaders to ensure platforms are scalable, resilient, and aligned with business goals. While still hands-on, your impact is measured by the systems, standards, and teams you enable.
As a Lead Software Engineer, you are expected to perform the following general responsibilities:• Provide technical leadership for complex cloud infrastructure and platform initiatives spanning multiple teams or services• Own the architecture, design, and implementation of critical Azure infrastructure components and platform capabilities• Define and evolve standards, patterns, and guardrails for secure, scalable, and operable cloud solutions• Lead cross-team technical discussions, driving alignment on design decisions and tradeoffs• Enable and improve self-service provisioning and developer platforms that reduce friction and increase team autonomy• Anticipate and mitigate systemic risks related to reliability, security, scalability, and cost• Guide and mentor Senior and Software Engineer II team members through design reviews, feedback, and technical coaching• Partner closely with product, security, operations, and architecture stakeholders to translate business needs into platform solutions
All About You
It is expected that a candidate has experience across multiple areas listed below:
• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building, and operating Azure-based cloud infrastructure at scale, including compute, networking, storage, identity, and platform services• Deep expertise with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation, using tools such as ARM, Bicep, Terraform, or equivalent, with a strong emphasis on modularity, reuse, and policy enforcement• Strong command of cloud security and networking concepts, including identity and access management, private networking, secure service boundaries, and defense-in-depth architectures• Proven experience designing resilient, highly available, and fault-tolerant platforms, with a strong understanding of failure modes and disaster recovery strategies• Demonstrated ability to lead large or complex initiatives end-to-end, including authoring and reviewing technical designs, decomposing work, sequencing delivery, and managing safe production rollouts• Treats operability and cost efficiency as core design principles, ensuring observability, auditing, and financial transparency are built into platform solutions• Advanced troubleshooting skills, capable of diagnosing and resolving broad, cross-system production issues with minimal guidance• Strong experience with enterprise CI/CD and SDLC practices, including quality gates, change management, and automation at scale• Clear, influential communicator able to document architectures, establish technical direction, and drive consensus across distributed teams• Consistent track record of mentoring and elevating other engineers, raising technical quality and ownership across the team• Pragmatic and collaborative leader who balances technical excellence with delivery needs and organizational realities• Actively evaluates industry trends in cloud, DevOps, and platform engineering and applies them thoughtfully to Mastercard's ecosystem
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.