Senior Principal 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

Senior Principal Software Engineer

Overview:
Ethoca, a Mastercard company, seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to provide technical leadership, architectural direction, and hands-on expertise in building scalable, secure, and high-performing systems. As a senior technical leader, you will partner with product managers, architects, and engineering teams to design and deliver innovative solutions that align with business goals and technology strategy.

Ethoca, is a global, collaboration-driven technology services provider that connects card issuers and merchants to combat fraud, enhance customer experience, and prevent disputes. We design and build secure, decoupled, message-driven, and distributed systems that are testable, maintainable, and scalable. By embracing reactive design patterns, our systems remain resilient and responsive while staying flexible to change. As we advance our technology roadmap, we continuously evaluate and adopt community-endorsed technologies across every layer of our platform. Our backend is primarily JVM-based, and we leverage or explore technologies such as Kafka, Spring Boot, Kappa Architecture, Angular 12, Bootstrap, Chef, Ansible, OpenStack, Nomad/Consul, Snowflake ETP pipelines, and more.

We seek individuals eager to make a significant impact on a major technology transformation, using the best products, patterns, and practices. If you thrive in an environment where innovation, influence, and technical excellence matter, this is the place for you.

Role:
• Lead complex enterprise-wide services/programs, ensuring alignment with strategic objectives and modernization goals.
• Architect and deliver new services and features in collaboration with business and product owners.
• Drive architectural design, policies, and service interactions, optimizing cost, efficiency, and scalability.
• Simplify and improve the cost/benefit of a function/service/architecture strategy.
• Contribute to technical roadmaps and long-term strategic planning.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate business needs into technical requirements and solutions.
• Make timely technical decisions by evaluating trade-offs between competing priorities and opinions
• Identify synergies and reuse opportunities across teams and programs
• Mentor and guide engineers and team leads to improve productivity, code quality, and adherence to technology standards.
• Support people managers in hiring, talent development, and performance evaluations.

All About You:
• Proven software engineering experience in senior, principal, or architect-level roles.
• Deep expertise in designing and delivering large-scale, distributed, highly available systems.
• Strong background in cloud technologies including Azure and Snowflake, with hands-on experience migrating applications and platforms from on-premise to cloud environments.
• Proficiency in Java and modern microservices architectures to build scalable and resilient systems.
• Experience in measuring and improving software development productivity (e.g., code churn, commit size, release frequency).
• Ability to develop, evangelize, and enforce reference architectures and engineering principles (e.g., active-active-active, auto-scaling, self-healing).
• Proficient in defining and reviewing complex end-to-end system architectures using Domain-Driven Design, Architecture Trace Diagrams, Data Flow Diagrams, ArchiMate, SysML, or similar frameworks.
• Familiarity with logging frameworks and tools (e.g., log4j, SLF4J, Splunk) and building monitoring and alerting systems (e.g., Dynatrace).
• Skilled at trade-off discussions to balance capacity, regulatory requirements, security, business value, market parity, and technical debt.
• Expertise in designing testing strategies to ensure functionality and performance meet or exceed market and customer expectations.
• Knowledge of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architectures, including Web/Application servers, API Gateways, databases, and load balancers.
• Skilled in building monitoring and alerting systems that track key signals such as resource usage, threshold breaches, and rate of change, using industry-standard tools (e.g., Dynatrace).
• Ability to coach engineers on full-stack development, end-to-end service ownership, standard software patterns, and productivity improvement.
• Strong communication skills to clearly articulate architecture patterns, business implications, and technical decisions to executives and stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent professional experience.

This role is not eligible for Mastercard’s work authorization sponsorship. As such, candidates must be eligible to work in the United States, now as well as in the future, without employer sponsorship.


#LI-NF1

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 [email protected] 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.

Pay Ranges

O'Fallon, Missouri: $200,000 - $320,000 USD