Manager, Software Engineering

Appcast Enterprise; Town of Kildare (WI); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard is seeking a Manager, Software Engineering to lead a team responsible for building, scaling and operating Authentication Decisioning capabilities. You will balance people leadership with technical execution and work with Product, Architecture, SRE and Programme teams to deliver customer and business outcomes.

The ideal candidate brings experience leading large-scale distributed systems, strong backend and cloud-native architecture skills, and a proven ability to drive reliability and

Qualifications

• Experience leading software engineering teams delivering large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong backend development and system design skills.
• Experience operating mission-critical platforms with high availability and performance.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication abilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a high-performing software engineering team.
• Drive strategic roadmap delivery balancing features and tech debt.
• Partner with architects to define scalable, secure solutions.
• Ensure reliability, performance, availability and incident management.
• Champion CI/CD, automated testing, observability, secure software.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align priorities.
• Support hiring, performance reviews and development.
• Drive improvements in developer productivity and software quality.

Skills

Team leadership

Backend development

Cloud-native

System design

Reliability & performance

CI/CD & testing

Observability

Stakeholder Mgmt

Ambiguity navigation

Communication

Tools

Rules engines

AI/ML platforms

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

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

Manager, Software Engineering

Overview

Authentication Decisioning is a strategic product within the Decision Management Platform (DMP) and forms a critical component of Mastercard's authentication ecosystem. The platform delivers real-time authentication and risk decisions by combining AI models, business rules, decision processing, data enrichment, and intelligence services to protect cardholders while enabling seamless customer experiences. Authentication Decisioning supports Consumer Authentication Solutions, Identity Check, Smart Authentication and MDES Token Provisioning use cases, operating at Mastercard scale with stringent availability, performance, and security requirements.

Role

As Manager, Software Engineering, you will lead a team of engineers responsible for building, scaling and operating critical Authentication Decisioning capabilities. You will balance people leadership, technical execution and operational excellence while partnering closely with Product, Architecture, SRE and Programme teams to deliver customer and business outcomes.

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

All About You

• Proven experience leading software engineering teams delivering large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong technical background in backend software development, system design and cloud-native or service-oriented architectures.
• Experience operating mission-critical platforms with demanding availability, resilience and performance requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to build and develop high-performing engineering teams.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence across technical and business organisations.
• Experience driving engineering execution in a fast-paced environment with multiple competing priorities.
• Passion for operational excellence, software quality and continuous improvement.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical challenges into clear business outcomes.
• Comfortable working with AI-driven decisioning platforms, data-intensive systems and real-time transaction processing environments.
• Proven ability to lead through ambiguity, make sound technical decisions and deliver measurable business impact.

Preferred

• Experience within fraud, risk, authentication, payments or financial services domains.
• Familiarity with rules engines, AI/ML-powered decisioning systems and large-scale transaction processing platforms.
• Experience leading platform modernisation, cloud transformation or architectural simplification initiatives.

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.