Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Mastercard; Ashbourne; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard seeks a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to ensure reliability, scalability, and performance of critical applications within our Business Operations domain. You will mentor peers, influence architecture, and drive automation to support global services powering Mastercard’s operations.

You will partner with product and platform teams to implement fault-tolerant, secure systems, and lead proactive improvements across the lifecycle.

Qualifications

• Strong observability and metrics collection to support incident detection and response.
• Coding/scripting to automate tasks and build operational tools.
• Experience configuring Linux/Unix systems and networks.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) and scalable architectures.
• Ability to design for high availability and disaster recovery.
• Knowledge of CI/CD, containers, and orchestration practices.
• Structured troubleshooting with root-cause analysis.
• Forecasting capacity needs and optimizing performance.
• Familiarity with IT service management processes.
• Proactive monitoring and improvement for reliability.

Responsibilities

• Be a developing subject matter expert in Site Reliability Engineering and influence stakeholders.
• Implement and maintain high-availability system solutions with automated operations.
• Evaluate requirements to design effective technical solutions.
• Lead automation and scripting to streamline incident response and processes.
• Troubleshoot complex system issues and address risks proactively.
• Contribute to documentation and best practices for operations.
• Conduct reviews to uphold standards for system stability.
• Stay current with industry trends and new technologies.
• Mentor junior team members and foster continuous improvement.

Skills

Observability

Programming

Systems administration

Cloud computing

Reliability & scalability

DevOps practices

Troubleshooting

Capacity planning

IT service management

SRE monitoring

Job description

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

Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Who is Mastercard?

At Mastercard technology, 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.

About the Role

The Business Operations team is seeking a highly motivated and experienced Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our team. You will play a critical role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our applications, supporting essential services that power Mastercard's global operations. As a thought leader in your field, you will bring technical expertise, a passion for automation, and the ability to mentor.

The role of the Business Operations Site Reliability Engineer is to be the production readiness steward for Mastercard products. As Business Operations SRE, we are responsible for ensuring that our platform is stable and healthy. We break down barriers to running our products by fostering developer run ownership and empowering developers to build resilient products. We support our developers during the application build phase in software run principles that include operational design, automation, capacity planning, and monitoring that leads to fault-tolerant, scalable products. We see the big picture and help create and enforce operations standards while facilitating an agile and learning culture.

We support daily operations with a hyper focus on triage, root cause by understanding the business impact of our products and subsequently performing blameless post-mortems. The goal of every Business Operations team is to engage early in the development lifecycle to be more proactive and upfront in the development process, and to proactively manage production and change activities to maximize customer experience and increase the overall value of supported applications.

Business Operations teams also focus on risk management by tying all our activities together with an overarching responsibility for compliance and risk mitigation across all our environments. Ultimately, the role of Business Operations is to align Product and Customer Focused priorities with Operational needs by providing continuous feedback throughout the lifecycle.

As part of the Business Operations team, you will:

• Be a developing subject matter expert in the Site Reliability Engineering area, influencing stakeholders and applying advanced knowledge to drive achievement of area goals and initiatives by contributing to solution development and improvements for existing products, services, and/or processes.


• Implement and maintain high-availability system solutions, ensuring stability, performance, and operational continuity.


• Evaluate operational requirements to develop effective technical solutions within existing frameworks.


• Lead automation and scripting efforts to streamline operational processes and incident response workflows.


• Troubleshoot and resolve complex system issues, escalating as necessary to maintain system health and proactively address risks.


• Contribute to documentation, knowledge sharing, and best practices to improve team operational procedures.


• Conduct reviews and quality assurance activities to uphold organizational standards for system stability.


• Keep current with industry trends and emerging technologies relevant to system reliability and operational automation.


• Guide and mentor junior team members through on-the-job experiences, reviewing work and fostering a culture of continuous improvement to grow expertise around their discipline.

Role qualifications

The ideal candidate will apply the following skills independently and consistently in complex or nuanced situations, begin using the skills to support broader goals, and be recognized as a key contributor who may coach or support others informally.

• Observability - Ability to use scripting and tooling to implement observability solutions, enabling the collection, analysis, and visualization of metrics, logs, and traces to support incident detection, diagnosis, and continuous service improvement.


• Programming and Scripting - Ability to write and maintain code and scripts to automate tasks, build operational tools, and support monitoring, deployment, and incident response using languages such as Python, Go, Bash, or similar.


• Systems and Network Administration - Ability to configure, operate, and troubleshoot Linux/Unix systems and network components, applying knowledge of networking concepts, protocols, security, and system reliability.


• Cloud Computing and Infrastructure - Ability to design, deploy, and manage applications and infrastructure on cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP), ensuring scalability, security, availability, and operational efficiency.


• Reliability and Scalability - Ability to design and operate systems for high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery, while ensuring systems can scale to meet current and future demand


• DevOps Practices - Ability to apply DevOps principles and practices, including CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and orchestration, to enable faster, more reliable software delivery and operations.


• Troubleshooting - Capability to systematically identify, diagnose, and resolve technical issues across systems, applications, and networks, using analytical methods and tools to restore functionality, minimize disruption, and ensure stable operations.


• Capacity Planning and Performance Optimization - Ability to monitor resource utilization, forecast future capacity needs, and optimize system performance to support growth, scalability, and efficient infrastructure usage.


• IT Service Management - Ability to apply IT service management principles to incident, problem, and change management, ensuring reliable service delivery, effective incident response, and continuous service improvement aligned to business needs.


• Proactive Monitoring and Improvement (SRE Applications) - The ability to use application reliability signals to anticipate problems, identify risks, and drive preventative improvements that enhance application performance and availability.

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.