Principal Systems Engineer

Principal Systems Engineer

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.

The Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) Partnerships and Cashflow division, team is looking for a Principal Systems Engineer to drive our customer experience strategy forward by consistently innovating and problem-solving. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in modern software architecture, with a proven ability to design and build cloud-native solutions that operate at global scale and support high transaction volumes.

As a key member of the engineering team, you will help shape a worldwide B2B technology platform that enables businesses of all sizes to seamlessly engage with Mastercard's SME Program. As part of a global organization, you will design and deliver highly scalable, secure, resilient, and high-performing services capable of supporting a diverse and growing customer base. This is a unique opportunity to play a key role in the continued evolution and expansion of Mastercard's SME Partnership Program while driving innovative solutions that create meaningful business impact.

Role

• Define and lead the architectural vision for Mastercard's SME Partnerships platform, delivering secure, scalable, and cloud-native solutions that support global business growth.
• Design and champion modern engineering standards, ensuring all solutions align with 12-factor application principles, enterprise security requirements, and industry best practices.
• Develop and maintain architectural roadmaps, technical blueprints, and service designs that drive the evolution of partnership and Cashflow platforms.
• Partner closely with product, engineering, and technology leaders to translate business objectives into innovative, compliant, and high-performing technology solutions.
• Lead architecture reviews and governance activities to ensure consistency, reliability, scalability, and adherence to enterprise design standards.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across engineering and architecture teams, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and engineering excellence.
• Represent the Mastercard SME Program as a trusted technical leader, collaborating with Architecture & Technology teams to advance global-scale cloud and hybrid solutions while leveraging AI-driven tools to enhance engineering efficiency and accelerate delivery.

All About You

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong foundation in computer science fundamentals, distributed systems, web applications, APIs, and microservices-based architectures.
• Proven experience designing and delivering cloud-native solutions using technologies such as Azure, AWS, Kafka, Kubernetes, and containerized platforms.
• Demonstrated success building and scaling high-volume transactional systems within financial services, banking, payments, or other mission-critical environments.
• Deep expertise developing large-scale backend services using Java, Spring, Spring Boot, Kafka, and modern event-driven architectures.
• Proficiency with modern web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and front-end frameworks such as React.
• Extensive experience designing and optimizing data solutions using PostgreSQL, NoSQL databases, and other storage technologies at enterprise scale.
• Hands-on experience with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, Git-based development workflows, and modern software delivery practices.
• Strong collaborator and mentor who effectively partners with engineers, architects, product managers, and cross-functional stakeholders to deliver impactful solutions.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical.

Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact View email address on click.appcast.io and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.

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.

Pay Ranges

Atlanta, Georgia: $170,000 - $281,000 USD