Principal Software Engineer – Authentication Platforms

About the role

As a Principal Software Engineer within Mastercard’s Consumer Authentication Solutions, you will lead the technical vision and architecture of global authentication and identity platforms. You will influence engineering decisions across multiple teams, mentor senior engineers, and ensure the scalability, security, and reliability of critical payment authentication services.

Key responsibilities

• Define and drive the long‑term technical strategy for authentication and identity platforms, establishing standards, reference architectures and design patterns.
• Lead the design of highly scalable, resilient, distributed systems that support global payment authentication, balancing performance, security and operational excellence.
• Champion modern engineering practices such as CI/CD, automation‑first operations, observability and resilience engineering.
• Collaborate with product, security, SRE and operational leaders to align technology strategy with business objectives and represent architectural recommendations to senior leadership.
• Mentor senior engineers and lead large‑scale technical initiatives, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

Required profile

• Proven technical leader with extensive experience designing distributed, cloud‑native systems and microservices at scale.
• Strong communication and influencing skills, able to drive consensus across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field; experience in payments, fintech or digital identity is strongly preferred.

Required skills

• Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, gRPC
• Kubernetes, Docker, cloud platforms
• Event‑driven architectures and messaging (Kafka, NATS, MQ)
• Microservices, Domain‑Driven Design, distributed systems
• Performance engineering, scalability, resiliency patterns
• Secure software development practices and enterprise‑grade security controls
• Observability, monitoring, incident management