Principal Data Engineer

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 Data Engineer

Who is Mastercard? Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.

Overview The Global Business Solution Center (GBSC) Tech team is looking for a Principal Data Engineer to steer and implement key projects related to Big Data solutions across Mastercard’s cloud and on-prem ecosystem. The ideal candidate is highly motivated, intellectually curious, analytical with a passion for reliability, scalability and automation.

Principal Data Engineer role:

• Serve as the GBSC’s subject matter expert (SME) on Data Engineering best practices and solution design

• Charged with designing and building scalable data pipelines and data storage schemas across Mastercard’s evolving on-prem and cloud data management ecosystem

• Define and evangelize reference architectures, design patterns, and engineering standards for data ingestion, transformation, storage, and consumption.

• Stays abreast of Mastercard’s data management ecosystem (e.g. Azure Data Fabric, Cloudera, Databricks , Apache Ozone, AWS S3, etc.)

• Collaborates with stakeholders to translate data needs into scalable, ingestible data storage & schema solutions

• Ensure data solutions align with enterprise governance, security, privacy, and compliance standards by design

• Mentors team members by sharing best practices, innovative techniques, and emerging trends to develop expertise and capabilities around their discipline

All About You:

• Demonstrated experience designing and building end to end data pipelines using ETL/ELT patterns.

• Hands on experience with data lake, lake house, and/or data warehouse architectures, including schema design and performance optimization.

• Strong working knowledge of data modeling concepts (dimensional, normalized, and analytical models).

• Expert level proficiency in Python, Java or equivalent for building robust, production grade data systems.

• Advanced SQL expertise, including performance tuning for very large and complex datasets.

• Deep hands-on experience with distributed data processing frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark or equivalent)

• Deep hands-on experience with platforms like Azure Data Fabric, Databricks, etc.

• Detail oriented with a passion for automation, adopting emerging technologies and applying industry best practices to data architectures and pipelines

• Excels working on a global team, communicating plans and leading execution across time zones

Desirable Capabilities

• Background in financial services, payments, or other high scale, high reliability domains

• Strong communication skills / experience communicating with senior leaders and executives

• Previous leadership experience leading a global team

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.