Principal, Software Engineering

Mastercard Inc.; Dublin; On-site; EUR 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard is seeking a Principal Engineer in the Advisors & Transformation group to accelerate our consulting transformation through AI and technology. You will design a scalable AI Platform and partner with business, product, data, and engineering leaders to establish unified technology for the future of Consulting.

This role requires hands-on engineering excellence, architectural judgment, and the ability to scale AI capabilities across thousands of advisors and consultants, while ensuring

Qualifications

• 8+ years of full-stack engineering experience in an agile production environment.
• Experience executing a technology strategy for a market-facing business with Product, Data Science and business partners.
• Strong understanding of GenAI, agentic workflows, AI enablement, orchestration patterns, and scalable AI delivery.

Responsibilities

• Design and build a scalable, reusable AI Platform for the program
• Lead technical design and architecture, ensuring scalability, security, and performance
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver innovative AI solutions
• Mentor engineers and influence engineering standards
• Define and maintain target-state architectures and reusable assets

Skills

Distributed systems

Full-stack engineering

Object-Oriented Design

API design

Strong communication skills

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science/Engineering or equivalent

Tools

AWS EMR

Aurora

Databricks

Snowflake

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 Principal, Software Engineering

Who is Mastercard? Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry, building digital platforms that securely power commerce at global scale. Our technology enables innovation across financial services, data, AI, and digital experiences, while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, security, and trust.

Business & Market Insights (B&MI)

B&MI is Mastercard’s data, analytics, and intelligence organization, responsible for transforming vast, global data assets into actionable insights and decision support products for customers across industries. B&MI builds platforms and products that move beyond static analytics, embedding AI, advanced modeling, and increasingly agentic systems directly into customer workflows to help clients understand what is happening, what will happen next, and what actions to take. The team operates on a global scale, where product, engineering, and data teams come together to deliver secure, governed, and production ready intelligence solutions that drive measurable business outcomes.

Role Summary

We are looking for a Principal Engineer within our Advisors & Transformation group who will be responsible for accelerating our consulting transformation through AI & technology, partnering closely with business, product, AI, data, and engineering leaders to establish unified technology for the future of Consulting. This Principal Engineer will design both a scalable and reusable AI Platform that will manage and drive AI productivity across the consulting organization, support AI commercialization in consulting engagements, and support existing portfolio or technology partnerships. The Principal Engineer will help scale tooling such as Claude, Copilot, and Cowork; enable agent orchestration and integration layers; extend AI knowledgebase capabilities; establish finops/tokenops models; and distribute reusable AI best practices, skills, and agents across Consulting. This is a highly collaborative role that will require close partnership with enterprise and services teams including enterprise AI, data governance, corporate security, compliance, sourcing, and Consulting business leaders. Success will require building shared capabilities into scalable, day-to-day productivity and commercialization solutions supporting thousands of advisors and consultants.

Roles and Responsibilities

• As a Principal Software Engineer, you will: Design and build a scalable, reusable AI Platform for the program
• Help drive AI enablement across the wider group.
• Lead technical design and architecture, ensuring scalability, security, and performance.
• Support ongoing initiatives and lead technical design and drive solutions and implementation with key stakeholders.
• Drive migration efforts for key components toward the future state architecture.
• Help define and implement a strategy towards future state architecture.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver innovative AI solutions that enhance user experience and accelerate digital transformation.
• Help ensure solutions align with Mastercard technology standards, architecture expectations, operating requirements, security, reliability, and scale needs.
• Mentor engineering teams and establish best practices.
• Serve as the architecture advisor for new business opportunities, ensuring technical feasibility, capability needs, and architecture implications are considered early in the opportunity lifecycle.
• Partner with product, business, sourcing, and engineering teams to shape opportunity hypotheses, solution concepts, business cases, and early feasibility assessments.
  • Evaluate new ideas, market signals, emerging technology trends, and opportunity spaces through technology, architecture, and capability lens.
  • Support the design and evolution of agentic and AI-enabled opportunity identification capabilities, taxonomies, prompt architectures, agent workflows, evaluation frameworks, and supporting intelligence systems as relevant to the role.
• Challenge assumptions and identify material technical risks early, before significant resources are committed to development or deployment.
• Guide architecture, platform, and capability decisions during incubation, prototype, market test, commercialization, and scale phases.
• Identify common capabilities, platforms, architectural patterns, and reusable assets that can accelerate value creation across multiple opportunities.
  • Define and maintain perspectives on relevant target-state architectures, including how future capabilities should be structured, integrated, governed, and scaled.
  • Help ensure solutions align with Mastercard technology standards, architecture expectations, operating requirements, security, reliability, and scale needs.
  • Mentor and influence engineers, architects, and product partners by contributing to shared engineering standards, architectural decisions, and technical decision quality.

Required Skills and Experience

We are seeking a dynamic and experienced Principal Engineer who is passionate about AI, engineering, transformation, and scaled business impact. Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• Significant professional experience building distributed, production-grade software systems, including 8 or more years of full-stack engineering experience in an agile production environment.
• Experience executing a technology strategy for a market-facing business in close collaboration with Product, Data Science, business, and peer technology leaders.
• Strong understanding of GenAI, agentic workflows, AI enablement, orchestration patterns, reusable agent/skill libraries, and applied AI delivery in a scaled enterprise environment.
• Experience scaling productivity capabilities across a large team, including commercial AI and agentic platforms.
• Strong understanding of APIs, services, asynchronous workflows, distributed systems, and enterprise-grade software architecture.
• Experience building or integrating systems that use LLMs, AI services, agent frameworks, workflow engines, orchestration platforms, or related technologies.
• Experience building, integrating, and scaling platforms or internal products that improve productivity, standardization, and delivery quality across large user populations.
• A strong hands-on technologist with very strong Object-Oriented Design and excellent programming skills, design principles aimed at creating re-usable, scalable components.
• Passionate about AI, emerging technologies and trends.
• Familiarity with cloud technologies and platforms, including but not limited to AWS EMR, Aurora, Databricks, and Snowflake, used to build and scale data-intensive applications.
• Ability to analyse, conceptualize and create cutting edge technical solutions based on the business needs.
• Strong communication skills, written and verbal, with experience presenting to executive and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Coordination and organization skills and the ability to work with multiple stakeholders and vendors across locations to ensure success of the project.
• Strong understanding, inclination, and experience of working in an Agile environment.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to evaluate tradeoffs across build, buy, partner, platform, architecture, scalability, integration, and operating model considerations.

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.

Everyone wants easier ways to pay; we invent them. Checkout lines are slow; we speed them along. Merchants want more sales; we give them data and insights. People need financial access; we connect them. Corporate purchasing is complicated; we make it simple. Commuters are busy; we speed them on their way. Governments need greater efficiencies; we help create them. Small businesses are virtual; we give them access to a world of buyers. Retailers want to fight fraud; we provide the tools.