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Job Title: Lead Software Engineer - Agentic Systems Overview: Lead Software Engineer Agentic Systems (L6) 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. ________________________________________ About Business & Market Insights (B&MI) Business & Market Insights (B&MI) is Mastercards analytics and intelligence organization, delivering insight products and platforms that help customers navigate change, benchmark performance, and take informed action. Internally, B&MI spans multiple product areas delivering contextual intelligence, precision analytics, operational insights, and consulting-enabled capabilitiesbacked by modern data and engineering platforms. ________________________________________ Overview Mastercard is seeking a Lead Software Engineer (L6) to help build and scale agentic systemsplatform and product capabilities where AI agents orchestrate multi-step workflows, invoke tools/services, and operate under explicit guardrails. This role sits at the intersection of distributed systems engineering and agentic runtime design. You will lead technical execution across a service or domain, establish architecture patterns for agent orchestration and tool invocation, and ensure that agentic capabilities are secure, observable, reliable, and auditable. You will partner closely with AI Engineers and Product teams, while owning system-level concerns such as identity, authorization, policy enforcement, operational controls, and production readiness. ________________________________________ Role & Responsibilities All staff at Mastercard are expected to demonstrate Mastercard Way cultural values every dayown it, simplify it, sense of urgency, thoughtful risk-taking, unlock potential, and be inclusivewith a relentless focus on our customers. As a Lead Software Engineer Agentic Systems, you will be expected to: Technical Leadership & Architecture Own complex engineering problems spanning multiple services and teams; drive alignment and resolution across dependencies. Design and deliver secure, scalable, resilient backend services and orchestration layers that enable multi-step agent execution. Define and produce technical artifacts (design specs, test plans, deployment strategies, operational readiness) for agentic platforms and services. Evaluate emerging technologies via proofs-of-concept and establish fit-for-purpose patterns aligned with enterprise guidelines. Agentic Systems Engineering (Domain Focus) Implement orchestration patterns for agents (e.g., supervisors/routers, stateful workflows, tool invocation frameworks) with deterministic controls and safe failure modes. Treat agent execution as first-class production behavior: ensure actions are attributable, authorized, auditable, and observable through logs/metrics/traces. Design guardrails and policy enforcement hooks that constrain tool usage and data access, and support reviewable why/what happened audit trails. Operational Excellence Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and remediation for complex production environments; drive continuous improvements based on learnings. Drive adoption of SDLC best practices: automation, testing discipline, secure coding, CI/CD, and release reliability. Identify and drive non-functional requirements (performance, latency, resiliency, scalability, compliance) and ensure systems meet Mastercard standards. Mentorship & Engineering Culture Perform thorough code reviews; raise quality standards; coach engineers on design, implementation, and operability practices. Mentor junior engineers and senior engineers; provide development and architecture guidance; model strong engineering judgment and collaboration. ________________________________________ All About You Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. Significant experience building and operating production-grade backend and distributed systems. Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Python) and modern service development practices. Demonstrated ability to own a service/domain end-to-end: architecture, implementation, deployment, and operational health. Deep understanding of secure service-to-service communication, authentication/authorization patterns, and secure coding practices. Strong experience with observability and operations (monitoring, tracing, incident response, postmortems, reliability improvements). Proven ability to lead through influence: aligning cross-functional partners, driving tradeoffs, and .
Here's how to pick the right one and stand out in your application.
144.883Jobs
31.687IN
81%EN
That number is real. WorkMundi's database shows 144,883 open engineer roles across the world. India has the most with 31,687 jobs, followed by the United States with 30,084. If you just finished reading one job ad and felt paralyzed by choice, you're not alone—but this scale is actually an advantage. It means you can afford to be selective.
Start by geography and language. The majority of engineer ads—117,837 of them—have the job posting text written in English. Use that as one filter, but remember: the ad text language tells you nothing about whether the role actually requires you to speak English day-to-day. Read the job description carefully. Then check which countries have the volume you're targeting. Singapore, Poland, and Australia round out the top five after India and the US.
Next, learn who's hiring. Accenture has posted 2,801 engineer roles. andurilindustries, speechify, and jobgether are also actively recruiting. If you're applying to one of these names, research their hiring patterns and interview style before you apply. That homework pays off.
When you interview, expect the question every engineer hears: 'Tell me about a time you had to debug a problem that wasn't in your job description.' Have a specific story ready—not a general one. Name the tools, the deadline pressure, and what you learned. Hiring managers listen for whether you see problem-solving as part of the role itself, not a favour.