Principal Software Engineer - Applications Architect

Overview

Provide technical and delivery leadership across payment-network initiatives, connecting architecture, release coordination, dependency management, and engineering execution across multiple teams.

What you'll do

• Define and evolve architecture for secure, scalable, and highly available payment-network services, predominantly Java based.
• Coordinate technical delivery across teams, including releases, dependencies, defect triage, and resolution of cross-cutting issues.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to translate business needs into architecture and implementation direction.
• Lead design reviews and drive decisions on APIs, service interactions, data, resiliency, security, and operational readiness.
• Identify reuse opportunities and promote common engineering patterns and standards.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads across teams.
• Communicate architecture trade-offs, delivery risks, and recommendations to senior stakeholders.
• Provide technical or product leadership, mentor team members, and drive decisions across multiple workstreams.

What you'll need

• Extensive software architecture and hands-on Java development experience in large-scale systems.
• Deep knowledge of Java, Spring Boot, microservices, REST APIs, messaging, event-driven architecture especially Kafka, SQL/NoSQL, and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with secure engineering, DevOps, performance, resiliency, observability, and production-readiness practices.
• Ability to lead through influence across organizational boundaries.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience working in Agile delivery environments and across the software development lifecycle.
• Clear communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Ability to work with globally distributed product, engineering, architecture, operations, and business teams.
• Experience leading SOAR (Solution Architecture Review) and driving technical strategy, architecture alignment, engineering excellence, and risk management across multiple teams.
• Experience creating and reviewing TADs (Technical Architecture Documents) for large-scale distributed systems, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards, security requirements, resiliency objectives, and long-term maintainability.
• Demonstrated experience defining and governing cross-platform architecture, enabling interoperability, reuse, standardization, and consistent engineering practices across multiple products and services.
• Experience designing and implementing multi-region resiliency architectures, including active-active and active-passive deployment patterns, disaster recovery strategies, cross-region data replication, failover mechanisms, and business continuity solutions.
• Strong understanding of distributed data management, including data replication, consistency models, recovery objectives, and operational considerations across geographic regions.
• Champions operability and maintainability as first-class design principles, ensuring observability, monitoring, automation, self-healing capabilities, supportability, and simplified operational management are built into solutions from inception.
• Deep understanding of Mastercard Engineering Principles (or equivalent large-scale enterprise engineering standards) and a proven ability to apply them consistently across architecture, software design, deployment, resiliency, security, and operational practices.
• Demonstrated ability to balance architecture, business priorities, scalability, security, resiliency, and operational considerations while establishing technology direction for multiple engineering teams.
• Experience defining architecture guardrails, engineering standards, reference implementations, and reusable patterns that improve consistency, quality, and delivery effectiveness across the organization.
• Strong knowledge of reliability engineering practices, including service-level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, observability, fault isolation, disaster recovery testing, and continuous resilience validation.

Nice to have

• Payments or financial-services domain knowledge.

Details

• Location: Pune, India.
• Number of positions: 1.
• Level: L5 (Principal Software Engineer).