Senior Principal Software Engineer, R&D

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

Senior Principal Software Engineer, R&D

Overview

Mastercard is looking for a Senior Principal Software Development Engineer to join the Mastercard Foundry Research and Development team in our Toronto location. In this role, you will establish the technical direction for complex, early-stage products, drive architecture decisions across teams, and bring innovative solutions to global markets at enterprise scale. The Senior Principal Software Engineer thrives on setting direction where product concepts are ambiguous, aligning engineering choices to commercial outcomes.
Our team is built on a foundation of research and development, mining innovation internally, innovating new product lines with emerging technology, managing new products from inception to market validation and engaging strategically with start-ups to shape the future of commerce with and for our customers. At Mastercard you will help define the future of commerce globally.
This team will have a diverse focus both in terms of geography and variety of technology challenges driving hard to bring innovative payment solutions and services to market.

As a Senior Principal Software Engineer on the R&D team, you will be at the forefront of the design of complex, large-scale new product concepts spanning Mastercard’s business units.

Responsibilities of the role include:

• Define highly scalable solution architectures for complex, early-stage product concepts across technology stacks, data platforms, and environments
• Establish engineering best practices that accelerate responsible use of AI across solution architecture and software delivery, including patterns for AI-assisted development, evaluation, observability, and production readiness
• Set technical direction for complex applications, interfaces, and integrations from concept through implementation, deployment, and release
• Set technical strategy and lead architecture implementation for Data Platforms in Foundry R&D, creating reusable patterns that can scale across products
• Influence technical direction across R&D, product, and technology teams, creating alignment on tradeoffs, delivery risks, and long-term platform choices
• Identify high-impact technical risks, make architecture decisions under uncertainty, and design experiments or prototypes to de-risk product concepts before market validation
• Act as a force multiplier for engineering excellence by coaching senior engineers, reviewing critical designs, raising quality standards, and creating technical practices that improve delivery
across teams

All About You
• Hands-on experience architecting and building 0-to-1 applications using Generative AI, LLMs, or agentic patterns
• Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy for complex initiatives, make architecture decisions under uncertainty, and influence senior technical and business stakeholders without direct authority
• Deep experience with one or more modern AI frameworks and SDKs for agent orchestration, AI application development, or coding-agent workflows, such as LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, or Codex SDK
• Expertise in cloud platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, AWS, and Azure
• Strong working knowledge of AI/ML, data analytics, and data product development with emphasis on data quality, data privacy, and localization
• Proven track record creating reusable architecture patterns, platforms, or engineering practices that accelerate delivery, reduce technical risk, or improve quality across an organization
• Uses AI to innovate on and improve individual and team engineering practices
• Expertise with Java, Spring Boot, React, Typescript, Postgres, and other object-oriented languages, front-end frameworks, and database technologies
• Strong business acumen and ability to apply technology to solve business problems
• Excellent verbal and written communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
• Proven track record raising the technical capability of senior engineers and teams through coaching, design review, standards-setting, and technical leadership
• Experience representing technical work through internal forums, external conferences, publications, open-source contributions, patents, or other thought leadership channels

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. This posting reflects one or more current openings on our team.

Pay Ranges

Toronto, Canada: $208,000 - $333,000 CAD