Manager, Software Engineering

Mastercard is hiring a Manager, Software Engineering. Level rates it ; you can apply on Mastercard.

Level's read on this job

Little AI ●○○○ is how Level rates this role: aI is not part of the work.
The posting mentions software engineering, team leadership and system design among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as a lead role.
Mastercard has 1,000+ other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Engineering manager leading a cross-functional team to build scalable, secure, and resilient payment systems and applications.

software-engineeringteam-leadershipsystem-designagilearchitecture

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 Engineering

About the Role

This is an exciting opportunity to join Mastercard's global credit card authorization program. We facilitate billions of transactions among issuers, acquirers, and service providers worldwide. We are looking for a strong software engineering people leader to build advanced technologies and applications that revolutionize payments.

As a Software Engineering Manager, you will lead a cross-functional team while helping shape the strategic direction of critical payment systems. You will be responsible for driving engineering excellence across software design, development, testing, security, performance, operability, and delivery, ensuring solutions are scalable, resilient, and aligned with Mastercard's enterprise objectives.

Role

As a Software Engineering People Manager, you will:

Team Leadership & Development

• Serve as a servant leader for a cross-functional engineering team including Software Engineers, Technical Program Managers, and Product Manager-Technical roles.
• Recruit, develop, and retain top engineering talent, ensuring a high-performing and diverse team.
• Coach and mentor engineers, helping them grow technical expertise, leadership capabilities, and business acumen.
• Conduct performance reviews, career development planning, and regular coaching conversations.

Engineering Strategy & Enterprise Leadership

• Partner with product, architecture, and business stakeholders to define technical strategies that support both team objectives and broader enterprise priorities.
• Translate business and customer needs into actionable engineering roadmaps and technology initiatives.
• Promote an enterprise mindset by identifying opportunities for cross-team collaboration, platform reuse, operational efficiencies, and shared engineering practices.

Software Architecture & Design

• Collaborate with architects and senior engineers to design scalable, secure, maintainable, and highly available systems.
• Review and approve software designs and architectural decisions, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture standards.
• Guide teams in applying modern architecture patterns, API-first design principles, modular services, and event-driven architectures.
• Drive design tradeoff discussions on balancing performance, maintainability, scalability, operational complexity, and business value.

Software Development & Engineering Excellence

• Remain technically engaged and provide guidance on software development best practices across the entire SDLC.
• Promote clean code, reusable components, maintainable architecture, and engineering craftsmanship.
• Review designs, code, and implementations with an emphasis on quality, security, resiliency, maintainability, and performance.
• Guide engineers in applying effective use of data structures, algorithms, and performance-aware design techniques.

Testing & Quality Engineering

• Establish and promote best practices for unit testing, functional testing, integration testing, and automated quality validation.
• Ensure teams maintain appropriate test coverage and incorporate testing into CI/CD pipelines.
• Drive quality engineering practices that improve reliability, reduce defects, and increase confidence in releases.
• Champion automation strategies that improve engineering productivity and software quality.

Performance Engineering

• Drive performance engineering practices across the team, including performance testing, benchmarking, scalability analysis, and system tuning.
• Ensure applications are designed and optimized for high-volume, low-latency transaction processing environments.
• Monitor and improve application performance, throughput, resource utilization, and reliability.
• Partner with engineers to identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks through effective system design and algorithm selection.

Secure Software Engineering

• Ensure teams follow secure coding standards and software security best practices throughout the development lifecycle.
• Promote security-by-design principles including threat modeling, secure architecture reviews, vulnerability management, and risk mitigation.
• Partner with security teams to ensure applications meet Mastercard security requirements and industry standards.

Operability & Reliability Engineering

• Own the operational health of applications and services, including observability, monitoring, logging, alerting, and supportability.
• Drive engineering practices that improve reliability, availability, resiliency, and maintainability.
• Ensure systems are designed for efficient operations, incident response, and long-term sustainability.
• Support Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps practices that improve operational excellence.

Troubleshooting & Incident Management

• Lead teams in diagnosing and resolving complex production issues across distributed systems and applications.
• Facilitate root cause analysis activities and ensure corrective actions are implemented.
• Provide leadership during incidents and production escalations, helping restore service quickly while minimizing business impact.

Delivery & Execution

• Drive execution and delivery of strategic initiatives while balancing business priorities, technical debt, operational needs, and team capacity.
• Own delivery of health, risk management, dependency tracking, and stakeholder communications.
• Make rapid, informed decisions in fast-paced environments, providing clarity amid ambiguity.
• Drive senior management communication, including delivery updates, operational readiness, risk assessments, and escalations.

All About You

• Proven experience leading high-performing software engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience with software development using Java, C/C++, or similar object-oriented languages.
• Demonstrated experience designing scalable, secure, highly available, and resilient distributed systems.
• Experience building and operating high-volume, low-latency transaction processing platforms.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, API design, microservices, and event-driven systems.
• Strong understanding of testing practices including unit, functional, integration, and automated testing frameworks.
• Experience with performance engineering, capacity planning, system optimization, and scalability testing.
• Strong understanding of secure coding practices, application security principles, and secure software development lifecycle methodologies.
• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, operational readiness, and reliability engineering practices.
• Demonstrated ability to apply computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and performance optimization techniques.
• Experience conducting code reviews and establishing engineering quality standards.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, troubleshooting, and decision-making abilities.
• Ability to develop and communicate technical vision and engineering strategy.
• Strong enterprise mindset with a focus on business outcomes and cross-functional collaboration.
• Proven ability to drive organizational change, technology adoption, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills across all levels of the organization.
• Ability to inspire teams, navigate ambiguity, and consistently deliver results in a complex environment.

Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact reasonable_accommodation@mastercard.com and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.

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.

In line with Mastercard’s total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in the US, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive base salary and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. The base salary offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including but not limited to location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Mastercard benefits for full time (and certain part time) employees generally include: insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance); flexible spending account and health savings account; paid leaves (including 16 weeks of new parent leave and up to 20 days of bereavement leave); 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time, 25 days of vacation time and 5 personal days, pro-rated based on date of hire; 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays; 401k with a best-in-class company match; deferred compensation for eligible roles; fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities; eligibility for tuition reimbursement; and many more. Mastercard benefits for interns generally include: 56 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time; jury duty leave; and on-site fitness facilities in some locations.

Pay Ranges

O'Fallon, Missouri: $140,000 - $231,000 USD

How we rate this

Manager, Software Engineering 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

Manager, Software Engineering is an open job at Mastercard.
Level rates this role AI Level 1 of 4: Little AI.
The role is based in O'Fallon, Missouri.
The job was posted on August 10, 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 EngineeringTeam LeadershipSystem DesignAgileArchitecture

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 team leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where system design 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?
Tell me about a project where architecture was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: Software Engineering, Team Leadership, System Design, Agile, and Architecture. 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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