Principal Software Engineer

Role Overview

You will join the Mastercard Foundry Research and Development team as a Principal Software Engineer, working within a small, high-trust agile squad in Nairobi. Your day-to-day focus will be on turning nascent product ideas into resilient, production-grade platforms – from early blueprint through to market validation – while also serving as a hands-on technical authority who shapes how several teams design and deliver complex, high-volume payment solutions. This role matters because the Foundry functions as the innovation engine for Mastercard, and your ability to translate ambiguous concepts into reliable, scalable systems directly influences how new commerce experiences reach millions of users across more than 200 countries.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end architecture and system design for new software products, making pragmatic trade-offs between speed, resilience, and long-term maintainability.
• Influence technical direction across multiple development teams, aligning them around consistent architectural patterns and ensuring decisions are coherent across product boundaries.
• Engage with product owners and business partners to understand unmet needs, translate them into technical requirements, and recommend innovative solution approaches.
• Drive engineering excellence by setting high standards for code quality, automated testing, continuous integration, and secure delivery practices within your teams.
• Ensure all designed systems comply with corporate security policies, data-handling rules, and operational principles for observability, incident response, and recoverability.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to engineers, helping them grow through code reviews, design discussions, and challenging the status quo.
• Collaborate with technical peers across the broader Mastercard organisation to share knowledge, reuse proven components, and maintain strong cross-functional relationships.
• Own complex technical initiatives from inception to delivery, coordinating work across distributed teams and removing obstacles to meet tight product validation timelines.

Requirements & Qualifications

• At least 12 years of professional software engineering experience in enterprise-scale, mission-critical environments, with a strong record of delivering large, complex systems.
• At least 5 years in a technical leadership capacity, such as principal engineer, architect, or senior tech lead, guiding architecture choices for multiple teams.
• Proven hands-on ability as a full-stack engineer, working across multiple languages, frameworks, and toolchains rather than being confined to a single stack.
• Deep experience designing distributed, always-on systems that reliably handle millions of daily transactions, including clear knowledge of resiliency, fault tolerance, and scalability patterns.
• Strong practical knowledge of public cloud platforms, containers, and orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes or equivalent), including how to operate workloads securely at scale.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex engineering initiatives that span several teams, with the ability to drive agreement and deliver on ambitious timelines.
• Comfortable operating with minimal supervision, thriving in a fast-moving environment where details matter and priorities can shift quickly between research and product delivery.
• A genuine appetite for continuous learning, exploring emerging technologies, and taking on challenging problems outside your existing comfort zone.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and build trust with collaborators at all levels.
• Strong decision-making and ownership mentality, holding yourself and your teams accountable for delivering key objectives on time and with quality.

What We Offer / Why Join

This is a rare opportunity to work at the heart of Mastercard's innovation ecosystem, where you will help shape the future of digital commerce through new product development and emerging technology research. You will be part of a highly collaborative and inclusive team culture guided by Mastercard's core belief in decency, and you will have the chance to see your work influence products that touch billions of people and businesses across more than 210 countries and territories. For a hands-on technical leader who cares about moving from idea to impact, the Foundry provides an environment where experimentation is valued, engineering excellence is expected, and your contributions directly support a sustainable and inclusive digital economy.