Lead Software Architect – Payments Network

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

Lead Software Architect – Payments Network

Mastercard’s 'Network Products' team is a group of thought leaders with an uncanny bias for action and an unrelenting focus on growth. The Product Architecture unit (within 'Network Products'), owns the product's architectural vision and has responsibility to deliver product architectural solutions, that drive growth story of our 'Switching' and 'Network Services' capabilities.

Software/Product Architects work closely with Product Managers, Regional Solutions to understand business goals and functional requirements, and put up high level System Design(aka Architectural Blueprint). This is an "Individual Contributor" role demanding strong technical, design, communication and negotiation skills.


Role
As a Product Architect – Network Products, you will be responsible for shaping the end‑to‑end product architecture of Mastercard’s switching and network services. You will work across the full product lifecycle—from ideation and discovery through execution and retrospection—to ensure that product architectures remain aligned with evolving business needs and technology landscapes.This is an "Individual Contributor" role. You will play a critical role in defining architectural direction, validating technical feasibility of ideas, driving innovation, and ensuring that product designs support scalability, resilience, performance, and security at network scale.

Responsibilities:
-Collaborate with Product Managers, Business stakeholders, and Regional Solution teams to define and refine the product vision, goals, and success criteria.
-Provide early architectural assessments of product ideas, evaluating Technical feasibility, Architectural fit and Long‑term scalability and operability
- Establish and advocate the Architecture Principles supporting Decoupling, Scale, Distributed processing, Microservices, Domain Driven Design, Performance, Security, Event Driven Architecture etc.
- Define the high level Logical Architecture(aka System Design) of the product, aligning to architecture principles. Ability to build consensus on the architectural solutions.
- For for new Product offerings, Epics & Use-cases, produce System Design documentation & Architecture artifacts, covering domain principles, service interactions, trade-offs and flow level architecture etc.
-Engage deeply with dependent and adjacent domains to ensure seamless integration while preserving clear domain boundaries and ownership.
-Work closely with Engineering teams, Service Architects, and Development Managers to ensure implementation adheres to approved product architecture principles and designs.
- Ideate, analyze and architect enhancements to our Network that will delight our customers.
- Support customer‑level, market‑level, and regional engagements by providing architectural insight to address strategic opportunities, risks, and technical challenges.
- Ability to Clearly articulate architectural trade‑offs and design rationale to diverse audiences, including business, technology, and leadership stakeholders.

All About You
-Strong hands‑on knowledge and experience in software architecture and system design for complex, enterprise‑scale systems.
- Strong technical knowledge and demonstrated experience in Software Architecture and System Design.
- Proven history of designing enterprise-grade applications following Domain Driven Design, Microservices, Event Driven Systems, Cloud Native principles, API design, Eventual Consistency etc.
- Exposure to Cloud, Messaging middlewares, Monitoring tools, Authentication/Authorization, gRPC, REST, Variety of Persistence and Caching technologies, Frontend stack, AI/ML, LLM, Deep learning etc.
- Exposure to following technologies- Java, REST, SpringBoot, Kafka, NATS, gRPC, noSQL, Cassandra, AI/ML, LLM, Postgres, Redis, Prometheus, Grafana, React etc.
- Excellent communication, presentation, negotiation and interpersonal skills.
-Strong ability to distill complex systems into clear, structured documentation
- Exhibit sound judgment and swift decision-making skills, strong attention to detail and accuracy.
- Understanding of payments industry, payment services and *Switching* is a plus.
-Availability to be in the office 3x per week.

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.