Lead Software Engineer

Mastercard, a global technology company in the payments industry, as a Lead Software Engineer. In this hands-on technical lead role, you will work closely with business, product, AI, data, and engineering partners to translate platform strategy and architecture into secure, scalable, production-ready capabilities. You will lead the design and delivery of reusable services, integrations, workflows, and developer capabilities for an AI platform that improves productivity across the consulting organization.

About Mastercard

• Previous experience building AI platform in Advisory, Consultancy space a distinct advantage
• We are seeking an experienced Lead Engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with hands-on technical leadership and a passion for applied AI, transformation, and business impact

Responsibilities

• Additionally, you will mentor junior engineers, support the migration of existing components, and ensure solutions align with Mastercard's technology standards.
• Lead the design and delivery of reusable services, integrations, workflows, and developer capabilities for an AI platform that improves productivity across the consulting organization.
• Provide day-to-day technical direction to junior engineers and vendor teams, reviewing code while maintaining accountability for delivery quality.
• Partner with product, business, architecture, and engineering teams to refine requirements, identify dependencies, and deliver incremental value.
• Strong technical judgement and the ability to evaluate trade-offs across architecture, security, scalability, integration, cost, delivery speed, and operational support
• Experience leading technical delivery for a team or workstream, including design reviews, code reviews, engineering planning, mentoring, and production readiness

Requirements

Strong experience as a hands on AI engineer

• Experience with large scale data platforms and modern ML/AI tooling
• Ability to coordinate across teams, locations, and vendors while maintaining momentum, transparency, and delivery discipline
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• Strong object-oriented design and programming skills, with a track record of creating reusable, maintainable, and scalable components
• Solid foundations in software engineering, system design, and distributed systems
• A collaborative mindset, a commitment to engineering excellence, and enthusiasm for AI and emerging technologies
• Ability to influence technical direction without formal people management responsibility
• Professional experience building and operating distributed, production-grade software systems, including substantial full-stack or back-end engineering experience in an agile delivery environment
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical decisions to engineering, product, business, and governance stakeholders

Preferred

• Understanding of GenAI and agentic workflows, including prompt design, grounding, tool use, evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, and responsible AI considerations
• Familiarity with cloud and data technologies such as AWS EMR, Aurora, Databricks, and Snowflake, or comparable platforms used for data-intensive applications
• Experience building or integrating solutions that use LLMs, AI services, agent frameworks, workflow engines, orchestration platforms, vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, or related capabilities