Principal Product Manager -Technical

AI in this role

Lead technical product management for real-time, event-driven payment platforms and shared services at global scale.

kafkanats

product-managementreactive-systemsevent-driven-architecturedistributed-systems

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

Principal Product Manager -Technical

Overview:
This role will be part of Mastercard’s Reactive Systems Architecture (RSA) organization, which underpins the company’s real‑time, event‑driven payment capabilities. RSA provides the foundational platforms, frameworks, and shared services that enable Mastercard to process payments at global scale with high throughput, low latency, resilience, and fault tolerance.

We partner with application teams to design, build, and operate mission‑critical payment applications—spanning Domestic, Cross‑Border, and Bill Payments—that are powered by RSA’s event‑driven platforms such as Axon (Kafka‑based streaming), NATS, and supporting shared services.

Together, RSA and the Applications team enable Mastercard product teams to focus on delivering business value, while the underlying architecture handles the complex non‑functional requirements essential to modern payment systems—scalability, resiliency, availability, observability, and security. Real‑time payment technology is central to Mastercard’s strategy to define a world beyond cash, and this team plays a key role in building and scaling the platforms and applications that make that vision possible.

Why Join This Team?
• Do you want to be part of a team shaping Mastercard’s real‑time, event‑driven payment platforms that operate at global scale?
• Are you excited to design and deliver systems that are responsive, resilient, elastic, and message‑driven, aligned with the principles of Reactive Systems?
• Do you enjoy building and collaborating with high‑performing, diverse engineering teams across the globe?
Would you like to work in a highly visible, strategically critical engineering organization that directly powers Mastercard’s future payment flows?

The Role:
What’s it all about and what we expect you to do day to day
• Be customer obsessed: Develop & provide the organization with a deep appreciation for customer needs, the ecosystem and the key market dynamics
• Set the vision: Lead multiple teams in adoption of lean product management practices: Define, establish, and continually refine a domain product vision & objectives, establish a product charter, and create and maintain a domain roadmap
• Define requirements: Translate product requirements into clearly defined epics, features and stories with clear & measurable outcomes, ensuring mutual understanding. An understanding of technical architectures and Event messaging frameworks is a must.
• Manage strategic alignment across teams: Working with product owners with each scrum team, ensure backlogs are properly prioritized and refined according to anticipated business value & measurable outcomes
• Agile Mindset: Advocate for taking an agile approach to product development through all activities from defining an epic to writing acceptance criteria on a user story.
• Lead the design and build of the product with engineering: Work closely- as one agile team- across a product domain
• Work across cross functional teams: Work with cross functional teams to plan work, understand dependencies, and minimize time to market and errors
• Oversee delivery and testing of product features (e.g., serving and enabling scrum teams)
• Manage the operation: Own the overall health and “run” of your domain. Escalate critical operational issues to Real Time Payments management teams and discuss resolutions to ensure operational stability with the concerned delivery teams
• Measure outcomes & seek continuous improvements: Evaluate & seek to improve existing practices, metrics, and roles to continually optimize. Own and deliver on post-launch reviews and customer feedback, and incorporate this information into the future launch plans

All About You and What you need to bring:
• Strong product management or new product development and experience shipping high-quality products in the payments industry. Understands and can explain the business context and the associated customer use cases
• Experience in Lean Product management and Lean management principles and practices. Can deliver high quality technology products/services in a high growth environment where priorities shift rapidly
• Comprehensive experience in agile delivery methodologies (scrum, Kanban, etc.), CI/CD and modern DevOps based PDLC and SDLC. Technical savviness to enable TDD and BDD.
• Track record of successful delivery of product features from design, development, deployment and customer integration.
• Proficient at grooming user stories, features and epics, setting entrance/exit criteria and prioritizing a platform product backlog. Understanding of event frameworks and technologies is a Must.
• Data driven – ability to define measurable and SMART leading and lagging metrics for all backlog items to enable decisions and priority.
• Take the time to fully learn the functionality, architecture, dependencies, and runtime properties of the systems supporting your platform products. This includes the business requirements and associated use cases, Mastercard customer's experience, Mastercard's back-office systems, the technical stack (application/service architecture), interfaces and associated data flows, dependent applications/services, runtime operations (i.e. trouble management/associated support strategies), and maintenance.
• Thrives in a highly collaborative environment involving different stakeholders and subject matter experts globally- across multiple regions. Recognize discordant views and take part in constructive dialog to resolve them
• Ability to engage with numerous stakeholders on existing product capabilities and potential co-development opportunities or dependencies
• Experience leading and managing others through both direct manager relationships and through influence
• Improve team processes that accelerate delivery, drive innovation, lower costs, and improve quality
• Action oriented & hands on: Owns outcomes & deliverables
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
• Payments expertise a huge plus
• Creative, fun, self-motivated individual
• Bachelor’s degree
• Globally distributed teams in India, EU and Canada.

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 Canada, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive pay based on location, experience and other qualifications for the role and may be eligible to participate in a discretionary annual incentive program.

Pay Ranges

Vancouver, Canada: $150,000 - $234,000 CAD

How we rate this

Principal Product Manager -Technical 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. Open the description and count.

Prepare for this job

A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Product ManagementReactive SystemsEvent Driven ArchitectureDistributed SystemsKafkaNats

Questions you could be asked

Tell me about a project where product management was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where reactive systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where event driven architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Walk me through how you've used Kafka in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: Product Management, Reactive Systems, Event Driven Architecture, Distributed Systems, and Kafka. 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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