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 Software Engineer

Mastercard Lead MQ Engineer Role Overview
Who Is Mastercard
Mastercard is a global technology company operating within 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. We leverage secure data and networks, strong partnerships, and a passion for innovation to deliver solutions that help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential.
Our culture is defined by our decency quotient, or DQ, which guides all of our actions both inside and outside the company. With connections spanning more than 210 countries and territories, Mastercard is committed to building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.
Organizational Overview
The Reactive Systems Architecture integration program establishes standard patterns for integration across Mastercard Programs and between Mastercard and its customers. The vision of this program is to enable customers to access our products and services through comprehensive capabilities. For developers, the goal is to provide a single manifest deployment and provisioning experience, allowing them to declaratively provision the shared services they require—whether on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge—in a self-service manner. This enables developers to focus on solving real business problems and delivering exceptional value to customers. Our customers benefit from a seamless experience that allows them to get up and running swiftly, with the security and performance necessary for their needs.
Lead MQ Engineer Role
Position Summary
As a Lead MQ Engineer at Mastercard, you will serve as both a technical leader and a hands-on contributor. Approximately half of your role will be devoted to deep technical work, while the other half will focus on technical leadership, mentoring, and cross-team collaboration. You will be responsible for the design, implementation, reliability, and evolution of the enterprise messaging platform, with a primary emphasis on IBM MQ in complex, high-availability environments.
You will collaborate closely with application teams, infrastructure, SRE, and security to ensure that our messaging backbone is secure, scalable, observable, and resilient. Your expertise will drive messaging best practices, operational excellence, and automation throughout the organization.
Responsibilities
• Architect, design, and maintain enterprise-grade IBM MQ solutions supporting mission-critical distributed systems.
• Act as the technical lead for MQ platforms, providing guidance, standards, and best practices to application and platform teams.
• Install, configure, upgrade, and patch IBM MQ across multiple environments, including on-premises and cloud deployments.
• Design and implement high availability, disaster recovery, and performance tuning strategies for MQ queue managers.
• Collaborate with application teams to design reliable messaging patterns, including request/reply, pub/sub, and event-driven architectures.
• Develop and enforce MQ security standards, covering TLS, certificates, authentication, authorization, and queue-level access controls.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and observability for MQ infrastructure to enable proactive detection and resolution of issues.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for MQ-related production issues, driving permanent corrective actions.
• Automate MQ operational tasks using scripting and configuration management tools to improve reliability and efficiency.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership through design reviews, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Stay current with the IBM MQ roadmap, messaging industry trends, and emerging technologies, recommending improvements as appropriate.
Qualifications
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least seven years of experience working with enterprise messaging platforms, with strong hands-on expertise in IBM MQ.
• Proven experience designing and supporting MQ in high-volume, high-availability production environments.
• In-depth understanding of messaging concepts such as queuing, pub/sub, transactions, persistence, and message ordering.
• Experience collaborating with application development teams to integrate messaging solutions.
• Strong troubleshooting skills, with the ability to diagnose complex, cross-system issues.
• Prior experience in a technical lead or senior engineering role, influencing architecture and engineering standards.
Preferred Skills
• Experience with distributed messaging and streaming platforms such as Kafka or NATS.
• Familiarity with Linux/Unix system administration in enterprise environments.
• Experience with scripting languages such as Shell, Python, or similar for automation.
• Knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes, including MQ containerization patterns.
• z/OS background
• Experience with configuration management tools such as Chef, Ansible, or similar.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, with preference for AWS, and hybrid messaging architectures.
• Understanding of observability concepts, including monitoring, logging, and alerting for middleware platforms.

Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact reasonable_accommodation@mastercard.com and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.

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.

In line with Mastercard’s total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in the US, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive base salary and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. The base salary offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including but not limited to location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Mastercard benefits for full time (and certain part time) employees generally include: insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance); flexible spending account and health savings account; paid leaves (including 16 weeks of new parent leave and up to 20 days of bereavement leave); 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time, 25 days of vacation time and 5 personal days, pro-rated based on date of hire; 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays; 401k with a best-in-class company match; deferred compensation for eligible roles; fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities; eligibility for tuition reimbursement; and many more. Mastercard benefits for interns generally include: 56 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time; jury duty leave; and on-site fitness facilities in some locations.

Pay Ranges

Remote - North Carolina: $140,000 - $231,000 USD

Job Posting Window

Posting windows may change based on the volume of applications received and business necessity. Candidates are encouraged to apply expeditiously.