MastercardManager Software Engineering
Mastercard is hiring a Manager Software Engineering in Pune, India. Level rates it ; you can apply on Mastercard.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this role Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
- The posting mentions Java, Python and APIs among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- Mastercard has 1,000+ other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Lead and manage a software engineering team responsible for the Mastercard Rewards Platform's global services and APIs.
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
Manager Software EngineeringRole OverviewWe are seeking an experienced Manager, Software Engineering to lead engineering teams within the Mastercard Rewards Platform — a global, multi-tenant platform supporting 400+ customers worldwide and processing millions of data transactions per day.
This role requires a strong balance of people leadership, technical execution, service ownership, operational accountability, and stakeholder communication. The ideal candidate should lead with strong DQ — Decency Quotient and EQ — Empathy Quotient, while ensuring the team delivers scalable, reliable, secure, and modern platform capabilities.
The candidate will be responsible for managing engineers, owning services end-to-end, driving delivery commitments, improving production readiness, and partnering across Product, Architecture, TPM, Operations, and leadership teams.
Key Responsibilities
People Leadership & Team Development
Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing software engineering team.
Build a culture of ownership, collaboration, accountability, trust, and continuous improvement.
Demonstrate strong DQ and EQ by leading with decency, empathy, fairness, transparency, and respect.
Provide coaching, feedback, career guidance, and performance management for team members.
Create an inclusive and psychologically safe environment where engineers can grow and perform effectively.
Balance delivery expectations with team well-being, quality, and long-term sustainability.
Service Ownership & Accountability
Own the services, applications, APIs, data pipelines, and platform capabilities managed by the team.
Drive end-to-end accountability across design, development, testing, deployment, production support, and continuous improvement.
Promote a strong “you build it, you own it” engineering mindset.
Ensure services meet expectations for reliability, scalability, security, observability, performance, and maintainability.
Manage technical debt, operational risks, production issues, and platform improvement opportunities.
Ensure documentation, runbooks, support playbooks, and operational readiness artifacts are current and actionable.
Delivery Execution & Engineering Excellence
Drive predictable delivery across platform enhancements, modernization initiatives, customer needs, compliance items, and operational improvements.
Partner with Product Owners, TPMs, Architects, and Engineering Leads to convert business priorities into clear execution plans.
Manage priorities, dependencies, risks, blockers, and stakeholder expectations.
Ensure the team follows agile practices, quality engineering standards, secure coding, test automation, CI/CD, and release discipline.
Support modernization from legacy systems to scalable, cloud-ready, and maintainable architecture.
Encourage adoption of reusable patterns, automation, observability, and engineering best practices.
Technical & Platform Leadership
Provide technical guidance to the team while partnering closely with Architects and Principal Engineers on solution direction.
Ensure solutions align with platform architecture, enterprise standards, security requirements, and operational guardrails.
Lead teams working across full stack applications, backend services, APIs, databases, batch jobs, data pipelines, integrations, and cloud-enabled services.
Support platform needs around high-volume processing, multi-tenancy, global customer onboarding, and operational efficiency.
Promote architecture alignment through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and implementation governance.
Operational Excellence & Production Readiness
Own operational readiness for team-owned services, including monitoring, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and release readiness.
Drive production issue resolution, root cause analysis, corrective actions, and preventive improvements.
Use operational insights and DORA metrics to improve delivery quality and platform stability, including:
Deployment frequency
Lead time for changes
Change failure rate
Mean time to recovery
Partner with SRE, Operations, Infrastructure, Security, and Support teams to improve service reliability and resilience.
Proactively identify automation opportunities, recurring issues, and support pain points.
Required Experience & Skills
Proven experience managing software engineering teams in enterprise-scale environments.
Strong people leadership skills with ability to coach, mentor, motivate, and develop engineers.
Strong DQ and EQ with demonstrated ability to lead with empathy, fairness, accountability, and transparency.
Experience owning and operating production services in a high-volume, mission-critical platform.
Strong understanding of full stack engineering, backend services, APIs, data pipelines, databases, and integrations.
Experience with cloud platforms, private/public cloud environments, containers, CI/CD, observability, and DevOps practices.
Understanding of multi-tenant platforms, customer-specific configurations, production support, and operational readiness.
Practical knowledge of DORA metrics and engineering productivity improvements.
Strong agile delivery, planning, risk management, and stakeholder management skills.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills with strong documentation discipline.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience in financial services, payments, rewards, loyalty, or large-scale customer-facing platforms.
Experience supporting globally distributed, multi-tenant platforms.
Experience with legacy modernization and cloud-native transformation.
Experience improving production stability, operational readiness, and engineering maturity.
Familiarity with enterprise security, compliance, audit, and regulatory expectations.
Exposure to automation, developer productivity, or AI-assisted engineering practices is a plus.
Success Measures
The successful candidate will be measured by their ability to:
Build and retain a strong, motivated, and accountable engineering team.
Lead with decency, empathy, clarity, and ownership.
Ensure team-owned services are reliable, secure, scalable, and operationally ready.
Deliver commitments predictably with high engineering quality.
Improve production stability, observability, incident response, and DORA metrics.
Maintain clear documentation and alignment across stakeholders.
Support modernization of the Mastercard Rewards Platform while ensuring platform stability for global customers.
Summary
This role is ideal for an engineering manager who can combine people leadership, service ownership, delivery execution, operational excellence, and strong communication. The Manager, Software Engineering will lead teams responsible for building, modernizing, and operating key capabilities within the Mastercard Rewards Platform while ensuring quality, reliability, and accountability at global scale.
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
Manager Software Engineering at Mastercard rates 10 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.
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.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
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 people management was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where service ownership was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where agile was part of your work. What did you do?
- Walk me through how you've used Java in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Software Engineering, People Management, Service Ownership, Agile, and Java. 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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