Who you are

- 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

What the job involves

- 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 recent product lines with emerging technology, managing current 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

- 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

📌 Senior Principal Software Engineer (Toronto)
🏢 Mastercard
📍 Toronto