Principal Software Engineer, Performance Engineering

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
Principal Software Engineer, Performance Engineering
Overview:
Real Time Payments (RTP) program is leading the secular shift in Payments towards real-time account-to-account payments and provides CNI payment services across 6 markets globally.
Role
We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering to lead performance, scalability, and resiliency for our Real time Payments (RTP) platform. This is a senior individual contributor role for a hands on engineer who thrives on solving complex performance problems in low latency, high throughput distributed systems.
Key Responsibilities
1) Performance Strategy & Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) Ownership• Own and drive the platform's non-functional requirements: throughput (TPS), latency percentiles, scalability, availability, and operational readiness, ensuring they are measurable and testable. • Establish and evolve SLIs/SLOs for customer and system outcomes (latency, error rate, throughput), partnering with engineering/product stakeholders to set realistic targets and guardrails. • Provide principal-level technical leadership to balance design trade-offs across feature velocity, cost, and reliability/performance.
2) Benchmarking, Load/Soak/Spike Testing & Certification Readiness• Design and own repeatable benchmarking and load test frameworks that cover service-level and end-to-end RTP flows, including concurrency and production-representative workloads. • Lead execution and analysis of load, spike, and soak tests (including extended-duration runs to detect leaks/degradation), and define pass/fail criteria aligned to RTP SLAs. • Drive "production-like" scalability demonstrations and translate results into prioritized engineering work, including scaling curve improvement and per-instance capacity improvements.
3) Deep Performance Engineering: Profiling, Root Cause & Optimization• Perform deep-dive investigations across distributed services: CPU/memory profiling, thread/lock contention, GC behavior, queue backpressure, network latency, database/query efficiency, and downstream dependency bottlenecks. • Lead root-cause analysis of performance regressions and stability issues; define corrective actions (code, configuration, architecture, capacity) and verify improvements via measurable benchmarks. • Partner with architects and engineers to ensure performance is considered in design reviews and implementation patterns, "shifting left" to prevent regressions.
4) Observability & Performance Guardrails in CI/CD• Define the performance telemetry needed to diagnose issues quickly (metrics/logs/traces), and build performance dashboards and reporting that create a clear narrative for engineering and leadership. • Implement performance regression detection and gating-automated checks and thresholds that stop degradations from reaching production.
5) SDLC-Wide Engineering Influence, Mentorship & Bar Raising• Mentor engineers and test/performance leads; raise the quality of performance engineering practices, reviews, and test hygiene across teams. • Participate in technical forums and drive adoption of engineering excellence practices across the program. • Contribute to hiring by conducting technical interviews and raising the engineering bar for performance and systems thinking.
6) Payments Domain & Compliance-Aware Engineering• Apply strong payments domain knowledge to performance approaches (e.g., ISO 20022 processing patterns, real-time processing models) and ensure designs align with security/compliance expectations where relevant.
All About You
• Software engineering experience with deep expertise in performance engineering for backend / distributed systems• Proven experience driving scalability and latency improvements in high volume, always on platforms• Strong hands on skills in performance testing, profiling, observability, and data driven optimization• Ability to influence architecture and engineering decisions without direct authority• Proficiency in JMeter, LoadRunner; observability tools like Dynatrace or Splunk• Experience in payments or financial services (real time processing a strong plus)
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.