Lead Software Engineer

Mastercard is hiring a Lead Software Engineer in Pune, India. Level rates it ; you can apply on Mastercard.

Level's read on this job

Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
The posting mentions LLMs, software engineering and technical leadership among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as a lead role.
Mastercard has 1,000+ other open roles on Level.
Posted in the last few days.

AI in this role

Drive technical leadership and software development for e-commerce payment authentication platforms using AI-native methodologies and LLMs.

llms

software-engineeringtechnical-leadershipai-native-sdlc

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

Our Purpose
We work to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. We cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences enable us to be a better team – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation and delivers better business results.

Overview:
Background

As part of an exciting, fast paced environment developing payment authentication and security solutions, this position will provide technical leadership and expertise within the development lifecycle for ecommerce payment authentication platform.

The Mastercard Authentication Program owns how consumer authentication works for both in-store and e-commerce transactional use cases. The primary purpose of this role is to develop and deliver best-of-breed authentication products for e-commerce transactional use cases that will drive uptake and penetration for the products and revenue for Mastercard. The authentication products that fall within this role’s responsibilities are ID Check, Token Authentication Service and Token Authentication Framework.

Role:
This position provides leadership to large, diverse, technology centers supporting MasterCard Business Partners processing needs and internal and external customer requirements.

Knowledge / Experience:
•Provide Technical leadership and strategic direction as a Lead to multiple teams and/or functional areas.
AI Native engineer - experience of software engineering across variety of LLMs. Has experience of AI native SDLC/PDLC.
•Experience managing multiple functional areas.
•Experience developing and managing departmental budgets covering multiple discipline areas. •Formal business or management training including Project Management, Financial Management and Strategic Planning.
•5+ years of experience in related field, with progressively increasing responsibility.
•Understanding of and extensive experience with Software Engineering Concepts and Methodologies.
•Proven ability to lead large complex projects and the ability to work effectively with all areas within Global Technology Operations, Corporate Groups and outside solution providers.
•Proven verbal and written communications skills are a requirement for this role and experience with the following deliverables is critical: requirements documents, design documents, and project financial analysis.

Skills/ Abilities:
•Ability to acquire and retain top talent.
•Management skills necessary to provide functional and directional guidance to direct and indirect staff. Ability to set direction and assure appropriate business outcomes of large or complex projects.
•Ability to approve and implement policy and provide strategic direction for the organization.
•Excellent Communication skills required to interact across multiple organizational levels of internal and external customer groups.
•Lead teams to deliver high quality, secure, scalable software solutions based on technical requirements specifications and design artifacts within expected time and budget.
•Research, create and evaluate technical solution alternatives for the business needs.
•Follow standards in development and testing to ensure compliance with Audit Requirements.
•Follow MasterCard Quality Assurance and Quality Control processes.
•Support collection and reporting of project and software metrics.
•Actively look for opportunities to enhance standards and improve process efficiency.
•Mentor and ramp-up junior team members.

All About you
•Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science or equivalent education.
•Excellent understanding and knowledge of Software Engineering Concepts and Methodologies is required.
•Experience to Agile is mandatory. SAFE Agile experience is desirable.
•15+ years of experience in the software engineering field including Technical Leadership experience as an architect is mandatory.
• Experience in Mobile application development, sdk, app development across iOS/Android
• Experience in AI native software engineering and development.
•Experience in Java, Junits, Spring, Spring Boot, Hibernate and web services. Working exposure to unix systems in beneficial.
• Expertise of design patterns
• Expertise and knowledge of SQL, PL SQL and Oracle is preferred.
• Expertise and knowledge of rest services is preferred.
•Expert knowledge of cloud-based application development like PCF or Azure or any cloud platform is required.
•Expert knowledge of micro services development.
•Must be high-energy, detail-oriented, proactive, and able to function under pressure to meet tight deadlines.
•Strong communication skills -- both verbal and written – and able to quickly learn and implement new technologies, application appropriate frameworks and tools.
•Strong relationship, collaborative skills, and organizational skills with a high degree of initiative and self-motivation and Able to work as a member of matrix based diverse and geographically distributed project team.
•Willingness and ability to learn and take on challenging opportunities.
•Knowledge of payment domain esp. card payments domain is preferred.
•Application security, Circuit breaker, Rest API standards
•Knowledge of encryption, ssl and mutual ssl, signing, reactive programming, blue green deployment, resiliency, end to end tracing, wiremock spring cache, end to end tracing, open api specifications, crypto operations, load balance, secret vault, spring actuator, performance, sonar code, cloud

Our teams and values:
- We work within small collaborative teams consisting of software engineers and product managers;
- Our customer’s success is at the core of what we do;
- We are diverse and inclusive teams from many backgrounds and with many experiences;
- We believe in doing well by doing good through inclusive growth and making ethical and environmentally responsible decisions.

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.

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.

How we rate this

Lead Software Engineer at Mastercard rates 85 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Lead Software Engineer is an open job at Mastercard.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The role is based in Pune, India.
The job was posted on November 2, 2026.
Seniority: lead.
Applications are handled by Mastercard. Apply on Mastercard

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Software EngineeringTechnical LeadershipAI Native SdlcLLMs

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Python C++Machine learning AWS AI agents Kubernetes

Pay

Typical software engineer job: $168k

This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical software engineer figure when pay comes up. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

Tell me about a project where software engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where technical leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where ai native sdlc was part of your work. What did you do?
What's a project where you used LLMs hands-on?
How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: Software Engineering, Technical Leadership, AI Native Sdlc, and LLMs. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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