Principal Software Engineer/Solution Architect

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

Principal Software Engineer/Solution Architect

Principal Software Engineer / Solution Architect – Decision Management Platform

Overview
Join a team building modern, real-time decisioning platforms for fraud analysis and prevention. As a Principal Software Engineer / Solution Architect, you will define and lead the architecture for a customer-facing platform within the Decision Management Platform (DMP), focused on Decision Products UI (DPUI), also known internally as The Fraud Center. This role owns the API, service, data, and integration architecture for DPUI and works in close partnership with the UI Architect, who leads the user interface architecture.
You will shape technical direction, architecture strategy, and governance to ensure the platform is secure, scalable, resilient, and aligned with enterprise and regulatory expectations. Working closely with product teams, UI Architect, and engineering, UX, and operations partners, you will guide DPUI through modernization, customer enhancements, and business cases that require new capabilities or changes to existing services.

Role
• Lead the architecture for the DPUI API, service, and data layers, ensuring they support analyst workflows, customer-facing capabilities, real-time service interactions, and integration with the wider DMP platform.
• Define target-state solutions and guide the design of applications and services across event review, case management, report management, rules and strategy management, and operational workflows.
• Shape architecture across APIs, microservices, database technologies, and integration patterns to support scalable, resilient, high-performance transaction processing.
• Produce clear architecture deliverables to support decision-making, governance, and delivery alignment.
• Drive architecture decisions to closure, balancing long-term direction with practical delivery needs, platform stability, customer enhancements, and business case priorities.
• Partner closely with product teams and the UI Architect to shape solution roadmaps, define viable transition states, and align technical decisions with business priorities and delivery sequencing.
• Provide technical leadership to engineering teams through design reviews, implementation guidance, and delivery support.
• Work across engineering, UX, operations, and SMEs to ensure solutions are cohesive, supportable, and aligned with enterprise standards.
• Contribute to governance, assurance, and architecture review processes, ensuring that designs are well-articulated, traceable, and implementation-ready.
• Operate as part of the central architecture team, partnering with peer architects to align solutions, share direction, and promote consistency across the wider platform estate.
• Support and mentor emerging architects, helping to grow architectural capability and strengthen technical decision-making across teams.
• Drive improvements that increase speed to market, operational efficiency, platform flexibility, and long-term maintainability.

About You
• Proven experience architecting large-scale, high-performance distributed platforms in complex enterprise environments.
• Strong ability to define solution direction across multiple teams and support engineering through design, build, and delivery.
• Ability to communicate architecture clearly to support alignment, decision-making, and execution.
• Strong partnership skills, with the ability to work closely with product teams to shape solution roadmaps and align architecture with evolving business priorities.
• Confidence in leading decisions, managing trade-offs, and influencing technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to combine strategic thinking with hands-on technical judgment, bringing clarity to ambiguity and helping teams move forward with confidence.
Required Skills
• Strong foundation in distributed systems, API and service design, modern backend architecture, and data-intensive platform design.
• Experience with microservices architecture, domain-driven design, and modern integration patterns.
• Experience with CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes, and modern delivery practices across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.
• Strong understanding of web architecture, application development, integration patterns, and RESTful APIs.
• Experience with relational and operational data technologies, including Oracle and PostgreSQL, and data models that support high-volume transaction processing.
• Ability to define non-functional requirements across resilience, scalability, observability, security, and performance, and ensure these are reflected in solution design.
• Experience supporting modernization, migration, and platform transformation initiatives in environments where continuity of service is critical.

Desirable Knowledge / Experience
• Experience in fraud, decisioning, workflow, or analyst-facing platforms.
• Experience with high-performance data storage technologies such as GemFire and similar in-memory or distributed data platforms.
• Database experience, including Oracle and PostgreSQL, and data models that support high-volume transaction processing and operational workflows.
• Experience with streaming or messaging platforms used to support event-driven and near-real-time architectures.
• Experience integrating vendor and open-source products into an overall platform architecture.
• Experience developing and supporting highly scalable, high-performance transaction processing systems.
• Familiarity with architecture governance, risk, assurance, or enterprise review processes.
• Exposure to AI/GenAI or automation opportunities that improve user workflows, platform usability, or operational efficiency.
This is an opportunity to shape the architecture of a critical platform, working with cross-functional partners to evolve DPUI through customer, business, and platform priorities while helping engineering teams deliver high-quality solutions for both current needs and future direction.

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.