Lead Network Engineer, Site Reliability 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

Lead Network Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

Lead Network Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

Our Purpose: Mastercard powers economies and empowers people across more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. We are committed to building an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere—by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Through secure data, trusted networks, strong partnerships, and relentless innovation, we help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses unlock their greatest potential.

About the Role: Mastercard’s Program aligned Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams are dedicated to delivering a seamless experience for our customers. We achieve this by maintaining every aspect of our Programs infrastructure and technology ecosystem to the highest standards, ensuring compliance with rigorous security requirements. Within Mastercard, SRE focuses on the reliability and performance of core infrastructure, networks, and foundational services that power our applications. Our mission is to ensure these components operate with excellence, enabling applications to deliver an outstanding customer experience. In this role, you will join our Payments Network SRE team, where you’ll be responsible for continuously assessing and improving the service quality of a diverse range of networking technologies. You will provide strategic insights to key stakeholders on optimal resource utilization, capacity forecasting, and performance trends—helping to ensure availability, scalability, and resilience across our network.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead continuous assessments of network infrastructure supporting critical Mastercard applications, focusing on health, performance, and capacity analysis. Collaborate with Product and Development teams to forecast growth requirements and ensure scalability.

• Lead regular incident reviews with internal support teams to ensure root causes are identified. When patterns of failure or compatibility issues between software and infrastructure emerge, develop and implement strategies to remediate or mitigate risks.

• Champion observability as a core principle for infrastructure services by assessing environments and technologies to uncover gaps in monitoring and alerting. Design and implement strategies to close these gaps, ensuring all infrastructure telemetry is integrated into a unified, single-pane-of-glass view.

• Leverage automation and AI technologies to enhance proactive issue detection, enable self-healing capabilities, reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Mitigate (MTTM).

• Develop testing and validation plans for new environment builds, disaster recovery exercises and post-maintenance activities to certify environment readiness before customer traffic is routed to it.

• Champion continuous learning, development, and knowledge sharing across networking and other infrastructure disciplines to strengthen multi-disciplinary SRE team capabilities. Lead training initiatives for team members and Product and Development on networking aspects of the platforms.

• Evaluate vendor hardware, firmware, and software upgrade roadmaps, and conduct proof-of-concept (POC) testing to identify potential risks and opportunities for improvement in upcoming releases.

All about you:

• 5-10 years of experience in Network Engineering within operations or design, including at least 3 years supporting e commerce, financial services, or large scale SaaS platforms.

• Expert-level understanding of TCP/IP networking, including LAN and WAN architectures. Experience with private MPLS networks and SD WAN technologies is highly desirable.

• Advanced proficiency or formal certifications in Cisco, Arista, and/or Check Point network platforms.

• Strong knowledge of HTTP, DNS, and TLS protocols, with the ability to troubleshoot at the application and transport layers.

• Familiarity with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and DDoS protection services.

• Solid Linux fundamentals, including networking, system configuration, and troubleshooting.

• Deep understanding of load balancing concepts and traffic management strategies.

• Hands on experience with automation and IaC tools such as Ansible and Terraform, as well as structured data formats (JSON/YAML).

• Experience with Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools such as Dynatrace or Datadog, and familiarity with the OpenTelemetry observability framework.

• Proficient in packet level debugging, including capturing traffic with tools like tcpdump and analyzing packets using tools such as Wireshark

• Familiarity with Network telemetry tools such as Solarwinds & Netscout

• Excellent communication skills with a proven ability to coordinate complex troubleshooting efforts and lead root cause analysis (RCA) activities.

The Payments Network SRE team is responsible for the runtime availability of some of Mastercard’s most critical core payment systems, which support national infrastructure and operate 24/7 year‑round. As a result, this role will include periodic on‑call responsibilities when required.

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.

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.