Principal Engineer - Application Architect

Principal Engineer - Application Architect

Overview
Payments Network Technology is seeking a Principal Engineer to provide technical and delivery leadership across payment-network initiatives. This role will connect architecture, release coordination, dependency management, and engineering execution across multiple teams.
Roles and Responsibilities
- Define and evolve architecture for secure, scalable, and highly available payment-network services.
- Coordinate technical delivery across teams, including releases, dependencies, defect triage, and resolution of cross-cutting issues.
- Partner with product and engineering leaders to translate business needs into architecture and implementation direction.
- Lead design reviews and drive decisions on APIs, service interactions, data, resiliency, security, and operational readiness.
- Identify reuse opportunities and promote common engineering patterns and standards.
- Mentor engineers and technical leads across teams.
- Communicate architecture trade-offs, delivery risks, and recommendations to senior stakeholders.
- Provide technical or product leadership, mentor team members, and drive decisions across multiple workstreams.

Essential Skills
- Extensive software architecture and development experience in large-scale systems.
- Deep knowledge of Java, Spring Boot, microservices, REST APIs, messaging, event-driven architecture, SQL/NoSQL, and cloud-native platforms.
- Experience with secure engineering, DevOps, performance, resiliency, observability, and production-readiness practices.
- Ability to lead through influence across organizational boundaries.
- Bachelors degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
All About You
- Experience working in Agile delivery environments and across the software development lifecycle.
- Clear communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and stakeholder-management skills.
- Ability to work with globally distributed product, engineering, architecture, operations, and business teams.
- Experience leading SOAR (Solution Architecture Review) and driving technical strategy, architecture alignment, engineering excellence, and risk management across multiple teams.
- Experience creating and reviewing TADs (Technical Architecture Documents) for large-scale distributed systems, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards, security requirements, resiliency objectives, and long-term maintainability.
- Demonstrated experience defining and governing cross-platform architecture, enabling interoperability, reuse, standardization, and consistent engineering practices across multiple products and services.
- Experience designing and implementing multi-region resiliency architectures, including active-active and active-passive deployment patterns, disaster recovery strategies, cross-region data replication, failover mechanisms, and business continuity solutions.
- Strong understanding of distributed data management, including data replication, consistency models, recovery objectives, and operational considerations across geographic regions.
- Champions operability and maintainability as first-class design principles, ensuring observability, monitoring, automation, self-healing capabilities, supportability, and simplified operational management are built into solutions from inception.
- Deep understanding of Mastercard Engineering Principles (or equivalent large-scale enterprise engineering standards) and a proven ability to apply them consistently across architecture, software design, deployment, resiliency, security, and operational practices.
- Demonstrated ability to balance architecture, business priorities, scalability, security, resiliency, and operational considerations while establishing technology direction for multiple engineering teams.
- Experience defining architecture guardrails, engineering standards, reference implementations, and reusable patterns that improve consistency, quality, and delivery effectiveness across the organization.
- Strong knowledge of reliability engineering practices, including service-level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, observability, fault isolation, disaster recovery testing, and continuous resilience validation.
- Payments or financial-services domain knowledge is preferred.