Lead Software Engineer

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

Level's read on this job

On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
Tools and skills the posting cites include AWS, Terraform and Kubernetes.
Level classifies it as a lead role.
Level lists 1,000+ other open roles at Mastercard.

AI in this role

Lead software engineer responsible for building and scaling cloud-native infrastructure and platform services on AWS.

awsterraformkubernetesci-cd

cloud-nativeinfrastructure-as-codeplatform-engineeringobservability

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

Lead Software Engineer
Build the Cloud Platform That Powers Financial Innovation
Are you passionate about solving large-scale infrastructure challenges, building secure cloud platforms, and enabling engineering teams to move faster? We're looking for a Lead Software Engineer to help shape and evolve the cloud foundation that powers Mastercard's Global Open Banking platform.
In this role, you'll be a hands-on technical leader responsible for designing and operating highly scalable, resilient, and secure cloud-native platforms. You'll work alongside architects, software engineers, security teams, and business stakeholders to deliver solutions that support millions of financial interactions while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, security, and operational excellence.
This is an opportunity to influence platform strategy, drive modernization efforts, mentor engineers, and solve complex problems at enterprise scale.

What You'll Do
• Lead the design, implementation, and evolution of cloud-native infrastructure and platform services.
• Develop scalable, highly available, and resilient solutions running in AWS.
• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code solutions using Terraform and automation frameworks.
• Drive Kubernetes platform engineering initiatives, including cluster architecture, upgrades, performance optimization, observability, and operational governance.
• Design and enhance CI/CD pipelines that enable secure and efficient software delivery.
• Improve platform reliability, scalability, security, and operational efficiency through automation and engineering best practices.
• Partner with application teams to define platform standards and accelerate adoption of cloud-native technologies.
• Lead technical design reviews and provide architectural guidance for strategic engineering initiatives.
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and reliability improvement efforts.
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous learning.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend solutions that improve platform capabilities and developer experience.
• Contribute to engineering standards, operational runbooks, security controls, and governance processes.

Required Qualifications
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 6+ years of experience in software engineering, cloud engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or infrastructure engineering.
• Experience designing and operating production workloads in Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Experience building Infrastructure as Code solutions using Terraform.
• Strong experience administering and troubleshooting Kubernetes environments.
• Experience developing automation using Python, Go, Bash, or similar programming languages.
• Experience designing and supporting CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
• Strong understanding of cloud networking, DNS, load balancing, routing, and connectivity architectures.
• Experience implementing cloud security controls, identity management, and access governance.
• Experience supporting production systems and participating in operational on-call processes.
• Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications
• Experience operating large-scale multi-account AWS environments.
• Experience with EKS, Karpenter, service mesh, GitOps, and modern platform engineering practices.
• Experience with container security, runtime protection, and Kubernetes security controls.
• Experience implementing observability solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, or similar technologies.
• Experience with high-availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity architectures.
• Experience supporting PCI-DSS, SOC 2, or other regulated environments.
• Experience designing self-service developer platforms and internal engineering tools.
• Previous technical leadership experience mentoring engineers and leading cross-functional initiatives.

Technology Stack
You do not need experience with every technology listed below, but familiarity with many of them will help you succeed in this role.
Cloud & Infrastructure
• AWS
• Terraform
• CloudFormation
• Route 53
• VPC
• IAM
• Lambda
• ECS
• EKS
Containers & Platform Engineering
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Helm
• Karpenter
• Gitlab
• GitOps
Development & Automation
• Python
• Go
• Bash
• Git
Observability & Operations
• Grafana
• Prometheus
• CloudWatch
• OpenTelemetry
• Splunk
• Dynatrace
Security & Compliance
• Cloud Security
• Zero Trust Architectures
• Secrets Management
• Identity and Access Management
• Vulnerability Management
• PCI-DSS
• SOC 2

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 0 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

●●●● 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 1 of 4: Little AI.
The role is based in Navi Mumbai, India (Finicity).
The job was posted on August 14, 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

Cloud NativeInfrastructure As CodePlatform EngineeringObservabilityAWSTerraformKubernetesCI/CD

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Java C++TypeScript React JavaScript Azure

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 cloud native was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where infrastructure as code was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where platform engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where observability was part of your work. What did you do?
Walk me through how you've used AWS in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: Cloud Native, Infrastructure As Code, Platform Engineering, Observability, and AWS. 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.

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