Lead Software Engineer

Title and Summary

Lead Software Engineer

Role Overview

The CNPF Data & AI organisation is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to help build the next generation of intelligent, agentic products and platforms powering the Mastercard Virtual C Suite. This is a hands on technical leadership role for an experienced engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with practical experience building production ready AI systems.

You will lead the design and delivery of secure, scalable, and reliable agentic applications that can reason, orchestrate tools, interact with enterprise systems, and deliver measurable business value. You will work closely with Applied AI, Data Science, Product, Security, and Platform teams to move from concept to experimentation to governed production deployment.

Position Responsibilities

• Lead hands on architecture, design, and implementation of agentic applications, AI powered services, and platform capabilities from concept through production
• Define engineering patterns and best practices for production AI systems, including evaluation, monitoring, guardrails, resiliency, cost control, and rollback strategies
• Drive end to end software delivery across the SDLC, from discovery and prototyping to testing, release, and production operations
• Use engineering tools to accelerate design, coding, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, and delivery while maintaining strong engineering judgment and code quality standards
• Champion an AI enabled SDLC by improving developer workflows, automation, test generation, code review quality, release confidence, and team productivity
• Partner closely with Product, Applied AI, Data Science, and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous opportunities into scalable product capabilities
• Provide technical leadership through architectural decisions, design reviews, code reviews, hands on contribution, and mentoring of engineers across the team
• Build highly available, secure, and maintainable cloud native services with strong observability, performance, and operational readiness
• Shape technical roadmaps, identify short and long term platform needs, and influence architecture choices that enable scale, reuse, and faster delivery
• Collaborate across teams and business units to solve complex business and engineering problems with practical, high impact solution
• Keep senior stakeholders informed of progress, risks, trade offs, and implementation decisions in a clear and concise manner

Ideal Candidate Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building scalable, secure, maintainable production systems, including experience leading complex technical initiatives end to end
• Hands on experience building and shipping AI powered products or agentic applications using LLMs, orchestration frameworks, tool calling patterns, retrieval, and context aware workflows
• Strong understanding of agentic system design, including planning, reasoning loops, workflow orchestration, memory, grounding, evaluation, safety, and human in the loop controls
• Experience taking AI solutions from prototype to production with sound engineering discipline around reliability, observability, latency, cost, security, and governance
• Experience with modern AI frameworks, SDKs, and tooling for building AI applications, agent workflows, and developer productivity use cases
• Strong programming skills in one or more backend languages such as Java or Python, with the ability to write high quality, well tested, production ready code
• Experience with modern front end frameworks such as React and/or Next.js for building intuitive product experiences would be beneficial
• Experience building services in cloud native environments using Kubernetes and managed cloud services on AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Good understanding of APIs, distributed systems, event driven architectures, data pipelines, and integration patterns across enterprise platforms
• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, DevSecOps, and engineering automation, including the ability to improve SDLC efficiency and release quality using AI tools
• Practical experience using AI coding and engineering assistants to improve productivity across design, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and operational support
• Strong background in software security, including authentication, authorisation, secrets management, encryption, threat modelling, and secure deployment practices for AI enabled systems
• Proven ability to create reusable platforms, frameworks, or internal engineering capabilities that improve developer experience and accelerate delivery across teams
• Strong product mindset with the ability to translate user needs and business goals into practical, high impact technical solutions
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with experience influencing across engineering, product, data science, and leadership stakeholders

All About You

• You are a hands on technical leader who enjoys building and shipping real products, not just prototypes
• You have experience building or operating AI enabled or agentic applications in production and understand what it takes to make them secure, reliable, and useful at scale
• You combine strong software engineering fundamentals with curiosity and good judgment in applying emerging AI capabilities to real business problems
• You actively use AI to enhance your own engineering productivity and help teams adopt better ways of designing, coding, testing, documenting, and operating software
• You understand where AI can accelerate delivery and where human review, engineering discipline, and thoughtful controls remain essential
• You care deeply about customer value, developer experience, quality, resilience, and long term maintainability
• You are comfortable working in collaborative, cross functional, and internationally distributed teams
• You raise the bar for others through mentorship, technical leadership, and a practical, delivery focused mindset
• You communicate complex technical concepts clearly and effectively to both engineering teams and senior stakeholders

Corporate Security Responsibility

• 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
• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard's guidelines