Principal Software Engineer

Role Overview

This is a hands-on technical leadership position inside Mastercard Foundry's Research and Development group in Nairobi, where the work spans everything from early concepting through to production release of new commerce platforms. Day to day, you will set technical direction for a fast-moving product team, shape how systems are architected across team boundaries, and stay close enough to the code to keep the hardest problems moving. The role matters because Foundry exists to explore emerging technology and turn it into real products — the architectural decisions made here determine whether those products can scale, survive failure, and earn customer trust.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical design of new software systems and applications, from initial concept through commercial release.
• Influence architectural direction well beyond your own team, aligning multiple engineering groups on shared standards and patterns.
• Partner closely with product managers to translate business requirements into viable technical solutions, and act as a technical voice in those conversations.
• Ensure every solution satisfies Mastercard's security requirements and is designed for operability from the outset — deployment, monitoring, and support included.
• Champion a culture where engineering quality is treated as a competitive advantage, raising the bar through review, mentorship, and example.
• Build and maintain strong working relationships with engineering peers across the wider organization to unblock work and share knowledge.
• Mentor engineers on the team, develop technical talent, and foster an environment of trust and accountability.
• Deliver on committed objectives reliably, making sound technical trade-offs under delivery pressure.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Substantial professional background as a software engineer with full stack exposure, ideally including enterprise-scale environments.
• Working fluency across a range of programming languages, frameworks, and tooling rather than deep specialization in a single stack.
• A proven record of designing and shipping distributed, mission-critical, highly available systems that handle millions of transactions per day.
• Deep working knowledge of resiliency, fault tolerance, and scalability patterns, and the judgment to apply them appropriately.
• Strong grounding in public cloud platforms plus containers and container orchestration.
• Demonstrated technical leadership at principal or equivalent level — architecture guidance, cross-team initiative leadership, and the ability to earn trust and develop other engineers.
• High energy, strong attention to detail, and the self-direction to operate effectively under pressure with minimal supervision.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the relationship-building and organizational skills to move work forward across groups.
• Sound decision-making and a genuine appetite for continuous learning and difficult problems.

Why Join Mastercard Foundry

Foundry is a research and development organization, which means the work sits at the intersection of internal innovation, emerging technology experimentation, and new product lines taken from inception to market validation. You will also engage with start-ups and external partners as part of shaping where commerce goes next, and contribute to thought leadership in the field. For an engineer who wants architectural influence over products that do not exist yet, this is an unusually broad remit.