Director, Software Engineering

Our Purpose

We work 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. We cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences enable us to be a better team – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation, and delivers better business results.

Title and Summary

Director, Software Engineering Overview:

The Customer Connectivity Platforms group was created to establish a consistent experience for Mastercard customers as they interact with Mastercard for various products and services that Mastercard offers. An Edge Platform Services within this group provides services for system-to-system integration and focuses on API Gateways and File Transfers.

Mastercard seeks to define a world beyond cash. To accelerate this mission, we are committed to building and scaling products and applications that transform payments of any type. All such products and applications are enabled for a consistent customer experience using offerings from Customer Connectivity Platforms. These platforms must operate at payment scale and thus require good engineering skills to build and operate.

Questions to consider before applying for the role

• Do you like to be part of a team that is creating and executing strategic initiatives centered around digital payments?
• Do you look forward to developing and engaging with high-performing diverse teams around the globe?
• Would you like to be part of a highly visible, strategically important global engineering organization?

The Role:

What’s it all about and what we expect you to do day to day:

• Technology leader who is hands-on and can lead a team of engineers. Expected to spend 70% of time coding/on code-related activities, and 30% coaching engineers on the team. This person is recognized as a team’s authority and technical expert who drives innovation and organizational growth through their contributions.
• They get their adrenaline rush by coding away in IDEs. They spend the majority of their time writing non-feature code. They are hands-on all the time and collaborate by writing interfaces, tests (unit or acceptance), and architecture fitness functions, outside of meeting rooms. Tools like JDepend, ArchUnit, ADRs, and NetArchTest make them feel at home.
• They implement, monitor, and maintain compliance and security concerns in CI/CD pipelines to bring life to the principle of “Code is Design and Design is Code.”
• They are polyglot engineering gurus. They bring cutting-edge engineering practices to life in multiple evolving frameworks – Feature flags, fitness functions, and whatever is required to reduce the cost and increase the lifecycle value of the next feature delivered by engineering teams.
• They love declarative paradigm and functional programming. No one can stop them from paying off technical debt and refactoring the code for better SDLC, performance, and availability.
• Work on complex enterprise-wide initiatives spanning multiple services/programs and drives resolution.
• Work with business/product owners to architect and deliver on new services to introduce new products and bundles.
• Participate and contribute to the team’s agile process and decisions. Understand and contribute to prioritization. Drive prioritization decisions and trade-offs in working with product partners.
• Drive the architectural design, including dependent services, service interactions, and policies.
• Contribute and lead Guild initiatives by engaging and mentoring Engineers at all levels to improve the craftsmanship of Software Engineering.
• Simplify and improve the cost/benefit of a function/service/architecture strategy.
• Apply judgment and experience to balance trade-offs between competing interests.
• Venture beyond comfort zone to take on assignments across different areas of Software Engineering.
• Take on organization-wide and public speaking engagements and publish white papers and blogs on relevant and emerging technical topics.
• Consult across teams and across organization lines to identify synergies and reuse opportunities.
• Participate and contribute to Principal review architecture meetings and drive resolutions to enterprise-wide challenges and regulatory needs.
• Write recommendations for job promotions based on an unbiased view of one's accomplishments.
• Conduct technical interviews for hiring engineering staff and raising the performance bar.
• Identify and raise awareness to siloed behaviors within the organization and teams.

All About You and What you need to bring:

• Expert in building highly resilient and scalable distributed systems. Has deep exposure to various API Gateways, HTTP, gRPC protocols, messaging, and caching technologies.
• Progressively grown career with proven design and development experiences in multiple languages (e.g., Java, .NET, JavaScript, SQL), secure coding standards (e.g., OWASP, CWE, SEI CERT), and vulnerability management.
• Has an expert understanding and experience of DevOps best practices to guide developers and abstract application development from underlying hosting platforms and infrastructure. Infrastructure as code and cloud-first software development knowledge experience preferred.
• Experienced in the skills required to implement advanced test setups in production environments (e.g., A/B testing, canary releases, blue-green deployment, feature flags).
• Experience in Continuous Integration (CI) and Delivery (CD) concepts, and capabilities to support automation, pipelines, virtualization, and containerization.
• Understands internals of operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mainframe) to write interoperable and performant code.
• Has skills to develop and evangelize on reference architecture and run principles to help teams adopt Engineering Principles from the start (poison pill, active/active/active, auto-scaling, self-healing, others).
• Understands use cases for advanced design patterns (e.g., service-to-worker, MVC, API gateway, intercepting filter, dependency injection, lazy loading, all from gang of four) to implement efficient code.
• Understands and implements Application Programming Interface (API) standards and cataloging to drive API/service adoption and commercialization.
• Has skills to promote and coach teams to take on full-stack development and facilitate end-to-end service ownership.
• Has skills to engage engineers across the Technology organization to promote standard software patterns and reuse of common libraries and services.
• Has experience in leading and coaching teams to perform software planning and estimation for large-scale complex programs.
• Has skills to drive trade-off discussions to set the right development capacity based on value drivers (e.g., regulatory, security, new business, market parity, technical debt).
• Performance engineering experience to ensure applications are built to scale, run, and perform for varying demands.
• Has skills to evaluate practices, metrics, and roles to continually optimize SDLC methodologies and automate processes to improve lead time and quality.
• Has skills to perform architecture and cost analysis for internal, hybrid, and public cloud environments.
• Has skills to succinctly articulate architecture patterns of complex systems, with business and technical implications, to executive and customer stakeholders.
• Has skills to define and drive advanced chaos and other operational testing practices to test points of failures, monitors, and system behaviors under adverse conditions (e.g., resource spikes, network congestion, component or infrastructure failure).
• Experienced in agile and modern SDLC practices (Scrum/Kanban/Continuous Delivery/DevOps/Quality engineering) and the delivery situations they are used for.

Mastercard is an 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. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact 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 come 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;
• 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 based on location, experience, and other qualifications for the role and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. 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 new parent leave, up to 20 paid days bereavement leave), 10 annual paid sick days, 10 or more annual paid vacation days based on level, 5 personal days, 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, gender-inclusive benefits, and many more.

Pay Ranges

New York City, New York: $198,000 - $317,000 USD