Lead Software Engineer - Agentic 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
Lead Software Engineer - Agentic Systems
Lead Software Engineer - Agentic Systems (L6)
Who is Mastercard?
Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential.
About Business & Market Insights (B&MI)
Business & Market Insights (B&MI) is Mastercard's analytics and intelligence organization, delivering insight products and platforms that help customers navigate change, benchmark performance, and take informed action. Internally, B&MI spans multiple product areas delivering contextual intelligence, precision analytics, operational insights, and consulting-enabled capabilities-backed by modern data and engineering platforms.
Overview
Mastercard is seeking a Lead Software Engineer (L6) to help build and scale agentic systems-platform and product capabilities where AI agents orchestrate multi-step workflows, invoke tools/services, and operate under explicit guardrails.
This role sits at the intersection of distributed systems engineering and agentic runtime design. You will lead technical execution across a service or domain, establish architecture patterns for agent orchestration and tool invocation, and ensure that agentic capabilities are secure, observable, reliable, and auditable. You will partner closely with AI Engineers and Product teams, while owning system-level concerns such as identity, authorization, policy enforcement, operational controls, and production readiness.
Role & Responsibilities
All staff at Mastercard are expected to demonstrate "Mastercard Way" cultural values every day-own it, simplify it, sense of urgency, thoughtful risk-taking, unlock potential, and be inclusive-with a relentless focus on our customers.
As a Lead Software Engineer - Agentic Systems, you will be expected to:
Technical Leadership & Architecture• Own complex engineering problems spanning multiple services and teams; drive alignment and resolution across dependencies. • Design and deliver secure, scalable, resilient backend services and orchestration layers that enable multi-step agent execution. • Define and produce technical artifacts (design specs, test plans, deployment strategies, operational readiness) for agentic platforms and services. • Evaluate emerging technologies via proofs-of-concept and establish fit-for-purpose patterns aligned with enterprise guidelines.
Agentic Systems Engineering (Domain Focus)• Implement orchestration patterns for agents (e.g., supervisors/routers, stateful workflows, tool invocation frameworks) with deterministic controls and safe failure modes.• Treat agent execution as first-class production behavior: ensure actions are attributable, authorized, auditable, and observable through logs/metrics/traces.• Design guardrails and policy enforcement hooks that constrain tool usage and data access, and support reviewable "why/what happened" audit trails.
Operational Excellence• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and remediation for complex production environments; drive continuous improvements based on learnings. • Drive adoption of SDLC best practices: automation, testing discipline, secure coding, CI/CD, and release reliability. • Identify and drive non-functional requirements (performance, latency, resiliency, scalability, compliance) and ensure systems meet Mastercard standards.
Mentorship & Engineering Culture• Perform thorough code reviews; raise quality standards; coach engineers on design, implementation, and operability practices. • Mentor junior engineers and senior engineers; provide development and architecture guidance; model strong engineering judgment and collaboration.
All About You
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.• Significant experience building and operating production-grade backend and distributed systems.• Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Python) and modern service development practices.• Demonstrated ability to own a service/domain end-to-end: architecture, implementation, deployment, and operational health. • Deep understanding of secure service-to-service communication, authentication/authorization patterns, and secure coding practices.• Strong experience with observability and operations (monitoring, tracing, incident response, postmortems, reliability improvements). • Proven ability to lead through influence: aligning cross-functional partners, driving tradeoffs, and unblocking delivery across dependencies
Nice to Have
• Experience building systems that integrate LLMs, AI services, or agent frameworks; familiarity with tool invocation and workflow orchestration patterns. • Experience designing policy-driven platforms with auditability and compliance considerations.• Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures and DevOps practices (infrastructure-as-code, automated delivery, secure runtime patterns).
Leveling & Scope
This role aligns with Lead, Software Engineer expectations: a developing subject matter expert who influences stakeholders, drives improvements to products/services/processes, produces high-quality scalable solutions, leads operational excellence in complex production environments, evaluates new technologies, and mentors others.
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.