Senior Principal, Software Architect | Global Customer Acquisition & Engagement

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 Architect | Global Customer Acquisition & Engagement

Overview:

Mastercard’s Customer Acquisition & Engagement is seeking a Senior Principal, Software Architect to help define and shape that future. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with broad influence across Product, Engineering, and Technology. You will define the architectural vision, establish a practical path from today’s platforms to the future state, and work across teams to turn that vision into scalable solutions.

Success in this role means enabling teams to build faster, helping Mastercard’s technology assets work better together, and making it easier for customers to acquire and engage their audiences through a more unified MarTech platform.

The Mastercard’s Customer Acquisition & Engagement business helps brands attract customers, build loyalty and grow customer relationships. Our vision is to bring together assets across Mastercard into a more unified Marketing Technology platform: connected data, shared capabilities and consistent interfaces that support products and markets globally.

This is a full-time hybrid role based in Dublin, requiring three days per week onsite.

Role:

• Define and drive the North Star architecture for Mastercard’s Customer Acquisition & Engagement technology ecosystem, translating business and product strategy into a scalable technical vision.
• Develop and execute phased architecture roadmaps that move existing platforms toward the target state while clearly defining priorities, dependencies, and technical tradeoffs.
• Lead architecture across large-scale distributed systems, ensuring solutions are scalable, resilient, secure, observable, and optimized for performance and cost.
• Drive the integration and simplification of the MarTech ecosystem, including customer data, identity, audiences, personalization, offers, loyalty, campaign activation, experimentation, and measurement.
• Define enterprise architecture patterns, standards, reusable components, and reference implementations that enable engineering teams to build consistently and efficiently.
• Partner across Product, Engineering, Technology, and business teams to align technical decisions with customer needs, product strategy, and business outcomes.
• Evaluate complex technical challenges, trace customer journeys and data flows across platforms, identify architectural risks, and develop proofs of concept to validate solutions.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across cloud platforms, APIs, event-driven architectures, data platforms, integration patterns, automation, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Use generative AI and AI-assisted engineering practices to research and challenge designs, accelerate prototyping, improve engineering workflows, and assess implementations against architectural standards.
• Guide architectural decisions from design through production, embedding privacy, consent, security, resilience, performance, scalability, observability, and cost considerations.
• Influence technical and business decisions across the organization, translating complex architecture concepts into clear recommendations for engineering teams, product leaders, and senior executives.
• Mentor architects and engineers, promote strong engineering and architecture practices, and foster cross-functional collaboration while influencing teams without direct authority.

All About You:

• Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Lead Architect, Lead Engineer, Software Architect, or equivalent technical leadership role, with responsibility for enterprise-scale architecture and platform strategy.
• Strong computer science foundation with experience designing and building large-scale distributed platforms that securely manage customer and enterprise data.
• Strong hands-on software engineering and coding skills, with the ability to independently investigate technical problems, test hypotheses, build prototypes, and assess implementation quality.
• Demonstrated experience using generative AI within engineering workflows, with strong judgment around accuracy, security, privacy, and data handling.
• Deep understanding of cloud platforms, APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, data architecture, and enterprise integration patterns, with practical experience in automation and Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience across the MarTech ecosystem, including customer data platforms, CRM, identity resolution, audience segmentation, decisioning, journey orchestration, loyalty and rewards, channel activation, experimentation, measurement, and attribution.
• Experience defining target-state architectures and executing phased migrations across multiple products and engineering teams, including consolidating overlapping platforms and capabilities.
• Ability to simplify highly complex technical problems and connect architectural decisions to measurable business and customer outcomes.
• Strong executive presence with the ability to influence technical and business decisions across multiple levels of an organization, including senior executives and C-suite stakeholders.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with technical, non-technical, and executive audiences.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers and architects, build cross-functional partnerships, and influence teams without direct authority.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

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.