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

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 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.

Overview
We are seeking an experienced Lead Software Engineer that possesses strong experience with Golang with strong communication skills to work within the Next Edge program. The Next Edge program is developing Mastercard’s next generation edge platform with programmatic interfaces for data transport (transactions, messages, events, APIs, files, etc.) that give our customers a single point of entry to Mastercard network via private customer on-prem connectivity as well as from public clouds.

Role
• Lead the design, development, and evolution of Mastercard's next-generation edge platform and backend services.
• Drive architecture decisions and establish engineering standards, patterns, and best practices across the team.
• Partner with Product, Architecture, Security, and Operations teams to define technical strategy and roadmaps.
• Lead complex technical initiatives from conception through production deployment.
• Mentor and coach engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance.
• Identify and resolve system bottlenecks, reliability risks, and scalability challenges.
• Champion engineering excellence through Test-Driven Development, automation, CI/CD, and observability practices.
• Define and enforce testing strategies including unit, functional, integration, and end-to-end testing to ensure high-quality software delivery.
• Participate in production support, incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement efforts.
• Apply and champion secure coding standards, threat modeling, vulnerability remediation, and security-by-design principles throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Strong understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency patterns, and distributed computing principles used in high-performance systems.
• Influence cross-team technical alignment and drive adoption of platform capabilities across the organization.
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and talent development activities.

All About you:
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, MIS, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience with expertise in Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, and distributed systems.
• Strong experience with Golang and cloud-native application development.
• Experience designing and operating highly available, scalable, and resilient platforms.
• Strong knowledge of event-driven architectures, APIs, messaging systems, and networked applications.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containerization, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and DevSecOps practices.
• Proficiency with GitHub, Jenkins, and modern software delivery tooling.

Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact reasonable_accommodation@mastercard.com and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.

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.

In line with Mastercard’s total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in the US, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive base salary and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. The base salary offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including but not limited to location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Mastercard benefits for full time (and certain part time) employees generally include: insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance); flexible spending account and health savings account; paid leaves (including 16 weeks of new parent leave and up to 20 days of bereavement leave); 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time, 25 days of vacation time and 5 personal days, pro-rated based on date of hire; 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays; 401k with a best-in-class company match; deferred compensation for eligible roles; fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities; eligibility for tuition reimbursement; and many more. Mastercard benefits for interns generally include: 56 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time; jury duty leave; and on-site fitness facilities in some locations.

Pay Ranges

O'Fallon, Missouri: $140,000 - $231,000 USD