Senior Principal, Software Architect | Global Open Finance

Mastercard Inc.; Lusk (WY); Hybrid; USD 157,000 - 202,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard Inc. seeks a Senior Principal, Software Architect for its Open Finance team. This hands-on leader defines target architecture, drives roadmaps, and partners across Product, Engineering and Technology to deliver scalable, secure APIs and data platforms.

Based in Dublin with three days onsite, you will mentor teams and influence architecture decisions across markets, balancing regulatory requirements and global consistency.

Qualifications

• Proven experience guiding enterprise-scale architecture and platform strategy.
• Strong CS foundation with large-scale distributed systems experience.
• Hands-on engineering and coding with prototype assessment ability.
• Experience applying generative AI to improve engineering productivity.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive North Star architecture for Open Finance, translating strategy into a scalable tech vision.
• Develop phased roadmaps to modernize platforms with clear priorities and milestones.
• Lead architectural decisions across product, engineering and technology, balancing requirements.
• Evaluate technical challenges, identify risks, and validate solutions with proofs of concept.
• Mentor architects and engineers, promoting cross-functional collaboration and engineering excellence.
• Ensure security, resilience, observability, performance and cost-efficiency across services.

Skills

Open Finance

Cloud platforms

Distributed systems

AI-assisted engineering

Architecture roadmaps

Mentoring

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering

Tools

Infrastructure as Code

APIs

Automation frameworks

Security and identity management

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

Senior Principal, Software Architect | Global Open Finance
Overview: Mastercard's Open Finance team is seeking a Senior Principal, Software Architect to define and drive the architecture that enables this vision. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with broad influence across Product, Engineering, and Technology. You will establish the target architecture, define a practical path from today's platforms to a unified global ecosystem, and partner across teams to deliver scalable, secure, and resilient solutions.
Success in this role means enabling teams to build faster, promoting consistent and reusable capabilities across markets, and creating a platform that securely connects consumers, businesses, and financial institutions through seamless Open Finance experiences.
The Mastercard's Customer Acquisition & Engagement business helps brands attract customers, build loyalty and grow customer relationships. Our vision is to bring together assets across Mastercard into a more unified Marketing Technology platform: connected data, shared capabilities and consistent interfaces that support products and markets globally.
This is a full-time hybrid role based in Dublin, requiring three days per week onsite.

Role:

• Define and drive the North Star architecture for Mastercard Open Finance, translating business and product strategy into a scalable, long-term technology vision.
• Develop and execute phased architecture roadmaps that modernize existing platforms while establishing clear priorities, dependencies, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
• Lead architectural decision-making across Product, Engineering, and Technology, balancing competing requirements and aligning teams around common goals.
• Evaluate complex technical challenges, identify architectural risks, trace critical platform, data, and customer flows, and develop proofs of concept to validate solutions.
• Use generative AI and AI-assisted engineering practices to research and challenge designs, accelerate prototyping, assess implementations, and improve engineering effectiveness while applying sound technical judgment.
• Establish and promote reusable architecture patterns, reference implementations, Infrastructure as Code, automation frameworks, and engineering standards that enable teams to deliver consistently and efficiently.
• Simplify and modernize the platform by consolidating overlapping capabilities, reducing unnecessary dependencies, and retiring legacy technologies.
• Design and evolve cloud-native services supporting bank connectivity, consent management, identity, financial data aggregation, and account-to-account payment capabilities.
• Balance global platform consistency with local regulatory, compliance, privacy, data residency, and market-specific requirements.
• Guide architecture from concept through production, ensuring solutions are secure, resilient, scalable, observable, high-performing, and cost-efficient.
• Influence technical and business decisions across all levels of the organization by translating complex architectural concepts into clear business outcomes and strategic recommendations.
• Mentor architects and engineers, foster cross-functional collaboration, and promote engineering excellence through technical leadership and partnership.

All About You:

• Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Lead Architect, Software Architect, Distinguished Engineer, or equivalent technical leadership role driving enterprise-scale architecture and platform strategy.
• Strong computer science foundation with a proven track record of designing and building large-scale distributed platforms, ideally supporting financial services or other highly regulated industries.
• Strong hands-on software engineering and coding skills, with the ability to independently investigate complex problems, test hypotheses, develop prototypes, and assess implementation quality.
• Demonstrated experience leveraging generative AI to improve engineering productivity, solution design, and development processes, with sound judgment around accuracy, security, privacy, and responsible use.
• Deep expertise in cloud platforms, APIs, distributed systems, data architecture, identity management, security, and enterprise integration patterns, including practical experience with automation and Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience defining target-state architectures and leading multi-year modernization and migration initiatives across multiple products, teams, and technology domains.
• Strong understanding of Open Finance and Open Banking ecosystems, including bank connectivity, consent management, identity, financial data sharing, and account-to-account payments.
• Ability to simplify highly complex technical challenges and connect architectural decisions to measurable business, customer, and regulatory outcomes.
• Demonstrated success influencing technical and business decisions across multiple levels of an organization, including senior leadership and executive stakeholders.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Proven ability to mentor architect[s] and engineers, build trust across teams, and lead through influence rather than direct authority.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

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.