Principal, Software Engineering

Role details

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 Engineering Who is Mastercard? Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry, building digital platforms that securely power commerce at global scale. Our technology enables innovation across financial services, data, AI, and digital experiences, while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, security, and trust. Business & Market Insights (B&MI) is Mastercard’s data, analytics, and intelligence organization, responsible for transforming vast, global data assets into actionable insights and decision support products for customers across industries. B&MI builds platforms and products that move beyond static analytics, embedding AI, advanced modeling, and increasingly agentic systems directly into customer workflows to help clients understand what is happening, what will happen next, and what actions to take. The team operates on a global scale, where product, engineering, and data teams come together to deliver secure, governed, and production ready intelligence solutions that drive measurable business outcomes. Role Summary We are looking for a Principal Engineer within our Advisors & Transformation group who will be responsible for accelerating our consulting transformation through AI & technology, partnering closely with business, product, AI, data, and engineering leaders to establish unified technology for the future of Consulting. This Principal Engineer will design both a scalable and reusable AI Platform that will manage and drive AI productivity across the consulting organization, support AI commercialization in consulting engagements, and support existing portfolio or technology partnerships. The Principal Engineer will help scale tooling such as Claude, Copilot, and Cowork; enable agent orchestration and integration layers; extend AI knowledgebase capabilities; establish finops/tokenops models; and distribute reusable AI best practices, skills, and agents across Consulting. This is a highly collaborative role that will require close partnership with enterprise and services teams including enterprise AI, data governance, corporate security, compliance, sourcing, and Consulting business leaders. Success will require building shared capabilities into scalable, day-to-day productivity and commercialization solutions supporting thousands of advisors and consultants. Roles and Responsibilities • As a Principal Software Engineer, you will: • Design and build a scalable, reusable AI Platform for the program • Help drive AI enablement across the wider group. • Lead technical design and architecture, ensuring scalability, security, and performance. • Support ongoing initiatives and lead technical design and drive solutions and implementation with key stakeholders. • Drive migration efforts for key components toward the future state architecture. • Help define and implement a strategy towards future state architecture. • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver innovative AI solutions that enhance user experience and accelerate digital transformation. • Help ensure solutions align with Mastercard technology standards, architecture expectations, operating requirements, security, reliability, and scale needs. • Mentor engineering teams and establish best practices • Serve as the architecture advisor for new business opportunities, ensuring technical feasibility, capability needs, and architecture implications are considered early in the opportunity lifecycle. • Partner with product, business, sourcing, and engineering teams to shape opportunity hypotheses, solution concepts, business cases, and early feasibility assessments. o Evaluate new ideas, market signals, emerging technology trends, and opportunity spaces through technology, architecture, and capability lens. o Support the design and evolution of agentic and AI-enabled opportunity identification capabilities, taxonomies, prompt architectures, agent workflows, evaluation frameworks, and supporting intelligence systems as relevant to the role. • Challenge assumptions and identify material technical risks early, before significant resources are committed to development or deployment. • Guide architecture, platform, and capability decisions during incubation, prototype, market test, commercialization, and scale phases. • Identify common capabilities, platforms, architectural patterns, and reusable assets that can accelerate value creation across multiple opportunities. o Define and maintain perspectives on relevant target-state architectures, including how future capabilities should be structured, integrated, governed, and scaled. o Help ensure solutions align with Mastercard technology standards, architecture expectations, operating requirements, security, reliability, and scale needs. o Mentor and influence engineers, architects, and product partners by contributing to shared engineering standards, architectural decisions, and technical decision quality. Required Skills and Experience We are seeking a dynamic and experienced Principal Engineer who is passionate about AI, engineering, transformation, and scaled business impact • Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. • Significant professional experience building distributed, production-grade software systems, including 8 or more years of full-stack engineering experience in an agile production environment. • Experience executing a technology strategy for a market