Lead Software Engineer (Architect)

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 Engineer (Architect) Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we are building a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support digital payment choices that make transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Through secure networks, trusted partnerships and innovation, we help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. Overview The Mastercard Authentication Program delivers authentication solutions that enable secure digital commerce globally. Smart Interface is Mastercard’s EMV 3-D Secure 3DS Server platform and a critical component of the EMVCo 3DS ecosystem, enabling secure, scalable and standards-compliant communication across merchants, gateways, acquirers, Directory Servers and issuer Access Control Servers. We are seeking a highly experienced Lead Software Engineer (Architect) to provide technical leadership and help define and drive the long-term architecture and technology strategy of the Smart Interface platform. The successful candidate will combine deep software engineering and architectural expertise, EMV 3DS domain knowledge, and hands-on technical leadership to drive the design, development, and evolution of Mastercard’s next-generation authentication platform. Role Software Engineering & Technical Leadership • Lead the design, development and evolution of Smart Interface. • Translate business, product and technical requirements into scalable, maintainable and secure solutions. • Provide hands-on leadership across design, development, testing, deployment, production readiness and support. • Own and evolve platform architecture and contribute to technical roadmaps aligned with business and product strategy. • Guide engineers through complex technical decisions and lead code and design reviews. • Design highly available, low-latency transaction systems and cloud-native distributed applications using microservices, APIs and event-driven architectures. • Define integration and API standards and lead modernization initiatives that improve scalability, performance and maintainability. • Apply software design, architecture, Domain-Driven Design and data-structure principles to distributed systems. • Develop reusable components, frameworks and engineering patterns. • Apply secure coding, encryption, authentication, TLS/mTLS, certificate management and secrets management practices. • Design for resilience using fault isolation, retry strategies, disaster recovery and multi-region deployment. • Promote unit, functional and integration testing, performance engineering, observability and production diagnostics. • Troubleshoot complex issues, perform root-cause analysis and address technical debt and engineering risks. EMV 3DS Domain Leadership • Serve as a technical lead for Mastercard’s 3DS Server platform. • Lead development of EMV 3DS capabilities supporting current and future EMVCo standards. • Drive adoption of emerging authentication technologies and ensure interoperability across merchants, gateways, acquirers, Directory Servers and ACS providers. • Partner with product, engineering, architecture and standards teams to evolve