Head of Software Engineering – Authentication Platform

Appcast Enterprise; Kildare; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard's Authentication Decisioning team seeks a Manager, Software Engineering to lead a group delivering real-time authentication and risk decisions within the Decision Management Platform. You will balance people leadership with technical execution to drive customer and business outcomes.

You will champion CI/CD, automated testing, observability and secure software development while guiding architecture, incident management and platform resilience in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading software engineering teams delivering large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong backend development and cloud-native or service-oriented architectures.
• Experience operating mission-critical platforms with high availability and performance.
• Strong stakeholder management and ability to influence across organisations.
• Experience working with AI-driven decisioning platforms and real-time processing.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and develop a high-performing software engineering team.
• Drive delivery of strategic roadmap initiatives, balancing feature development, platform modernisation and technical debt reduction.
• Partner with architects and senior engineers to define scalable, resilient and secure solutions.
• Ensure operational excellence through strong ownership of reliability, performance, availability and incident management.
• Champion engineering best practices including CI/CD, automated testing, observability and secure software development.
• Collaborate across Engineering, Product, Security, Operations and Customer-facing teams to align priorities and execute effectively.
• Foster a culture of accountability, innovation, continuous learning and customer focus.
• Support hiring, performance management, succession planning and employee development.
• Drive improvements in developer productivity, engineering efficiency and software quality

Job description

Mastercard's Authentication Decisioning team seeks a Manager, Software Engineering to lead a group delivering real-time authentication and risk decisions within the Decision Management Platform. You will balance people leadership with technical execution to drive customer and business outcomes.

You will champion CI/CD, automated testing, observability and secure software development while guiding architecture, incident management and platform resilience in a fast-paced environment.