Principal Product Architect

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.

We are looking for a principal architect to join an award-winning team with a proven track record of combining data science techniques with an intimate knowledge of payments data to aid Financial Institutions in their fight against money laundering and fraud. Headquartered in The City of London, we craft bespoke services that help our clients gain an understanding of the underlying criminal behaviour that drives financial crime, empowering them to take action.

As part of the Architecture function, your role will focus on creating and maintaining architectural frameworks, understanding Product requirements and translating them in designs for the Engineering teams. You will have an active role in assessing architectural changes and new technologies. Your role will be global, designing global products and how these will be deployed regionally.

• Draft architectures that follow design principles, and discuss them with other technical and non-technical stakeholders (Engineering, Product, Data Science, etc).
• Define and maintain global API specifications, as well as mappings to regional API spec variations where necessary.
• Lead architectural design assessments for changes and evolution of FCS products.
• Lead technology assessments, software selections, and architectural evaluations to ensure alignment with business objectives and technical requirements.
• Circulate your architectural designs across cross-functional team leads to support estimations and development processes.
• Design to ensure resilience and reliability of services.
• Take ownership to improve the customer experience of an entire set of services/applications sold as products or bundled services.
• Simplify and improve the cost/benefit of a function, service, architecture strategy.
• Drive the architectural design, including dependent services, service interactions, and policies.
• Proactively address emerging technical concerns, and recommend innovations to enhance the market-readiness of specific solutions.
• Apply judgment and experience to balance trade-offs between competing interests.
• Venture beyond comfort zone to take on assignments across different areas of Architecture and Engineering.
• Participate and contribute to review architecture meetings and drive resolutions to enterprise-wide challenges and regulatory needs.
• Consult across teams and across organization lines to identify synergies and reuse opportunities. Ensure gaps are filled in understanding between teams.
• Identify and raise awareness to Silo-ed behaviours within the organization and teams.
• Develop complete understanding of end-to-end technical architecture and dependency systems.
• Review products and practices and ensure that all are efficient and Mastercard compliant.
• Design to ensure optimal performance and resilience of products.
• Estimate and own delivery tasks (design, dev, test, deployment, configuration, documentation) to meet the business requirements.
• Conduct technical interviews for hiring engineering staff and raising the performance bar.

The role is hybrid, based in central London, and the expectation is that you attend the office according to Mastercard policy, including team days, which are currently on Monday and Thursday.

• First and foremost, you enjoy designing products to solve real, pressing problems for your customers.
• You enjoy working in a team, and have an interest in data science and how advanced algorithms may be deployed as product offerings.
• You are curious and want to understand how new architectures and technologies can add value to FCS products.
• You are detail oriented, and enjoy drafting, discussing and evangelising architectural designs and documentation.
• Experience with large volumes of data and high throughput, low latency solutions.
• You understand and have implemented Application Programming Interface (API) standards and cataloguing to drive API/service adoption and commercialization.
• You are familiar with industry best practices for APIs and you have experience with OpenAPI.
• You have experience with, and are interested in, contemporary approaches to service design, including the use of containers and container orchestration technologies, streaming data platforms, and in-memory/NoSQL stores.
• You have an expert understanding of DevOps best practices to guide developers and abstract application development from underlying hosting platforms and infrastructure.
• You are comfortable communicating with a range of stakeholders, technical and non-technical; including Product owners, platform architects, subject matter experts, data scientists, software engineers and enterprise devops and security professionals.
• You have experience with productionising machine learning technologies.
• You have significant domain expertise in payments, fraud or money laundering, or equivalent in a field with similar application requirements.
• You are well versed in delivery enterprise software and relish the challenge of solving delivery problems in large organisations.
• You have experience in resolving different solutions and approaches to problems and can choose between pragmatic and rigorous solutions dependent on the situation.
• You have taken an active role in technology decisions, e.g. architecture, databases, languages or streaming technologies.
• You can perform architecture and cost analysis for internal, hybrid, and public cloud environments.
• You can succinctly articulate architecture patterns of complex systems, with business and technical implications, to executive and customer stakeholders.
• You understand advanced chaos and other operational testing practices to test points of failures, monitors, and system behaviours under adverse conditions (e.g., resource spikes, network congestion, component or infrastructure failure).
• You understand advanced test set ups in production environment (e.g., A/B testing, canary releases, blue-green deployment, feature flags).
• You understand common regulatory needs and standards for data protection (e.g. PCI DSS, GDPR).
• You have experience defining, documenting and evangelising architectural principles and design patterns.
• You have experience with data anonymisation and obfuscation solutions, including tokenisation.
• You are aware of principles and methodologies of architecture frameworks such as The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), and how to leverage them to design and implement enterprise architectures that align IT strategies with business goals.

• 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.