Lead Mainframe 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

Lead Mainframe Engineer

About Mastercard
At Mastercard, we work to connect and power an inclusive digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere. We make transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible through secure technology, partnerships, and innovation.
Our engineering teams build and operate the critical platforms that power national commerce. We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Lead Mainframe Engineer to help modernize, enhance, and support the core systems.
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Role Overview
As a Lead Mainframe Engineer, you will play a critical role in designing, developing, and maintaining high-performance mainframe solutions that support Mastercard's payment ecosystem. You will serve as both a technical and people leader, ensuring the reliability, scalability, security, and operational excellence of critical business applications and infrastructure.
This is a hands-on leadership role with significant influence on architecture, modernization initiatives, engineering practices, talent development, and delivery outcomes. In addition to providing technical leadership, you will be responsible for leading and developing a team of engineers, fostering a high-performance culture, and ensuring successful delivery of business and technology objectives.
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Key Responsibilities
• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade mainframe applications and services that support mission-critical business processes.
• Lead technical design and architecture discussions for complex mainframe solutions and integrations.
• Support the full software lifecycle, including analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, and production support.
• Develop and maintain solutions using technologies such as COBOL, JCL, CICS, IMS, DB2, MQ, and related mainframe technologies.
• Take ownership of end-to-end delivery, from requirements through implementation and ongoing operation.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues while ensuring high availability, performance, and operational stability.
• Collaborate with distributed systems, platform, infrastructure, product, and business teams to deliver integrated solutions.
• Improve automation, monitoring, resilience, performance, and operational efficiency across the mainframe environment.
• Ensure compliance with security, audit, and regulatory requirements.
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Leadership Expectations
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of engineers through regular one-on-ones, performance discussions, career development planning, and continuous feedback.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to engineers across the team.
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing culture that promotes innovation, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Set clear goals and expectations and support team members in achieving their professional growth objectives.
• Support hiring, onboarding, talent development, succession planning, and workforce planning activities.
• Drive engineering excellence and promote best practices in software development, testing, operational support, and continuous improvement.
• Influence strategic technology decisions and contribute to Mastercard's mainframe modernization roadmap.
• Partner with senior leaders and stakeholders to align technology initiatives with business objectives.
• Lead incident resolution and root cause analysis for critical production events.
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Skills and Experience
• Strong experience developing, maintaining, and supporting enterprise mainframe applications.
• Deep knowledge of z/OS and associated technologies, including COBOL, JCL, CICS, IMS, DB2, MQ, and TSO.
• Experience building highly available, secure, and scalable transaction-processing systems.
• Strong understanding of system architecture, integration patterns, and enterprise application design.
• Experience with performance tuning, capacity planning, resiliency, and production support processes.
• Experience leading and developing engineering teams, including people management responsibilities.
• Ability to balance technical leadership, people leadership, operational excellence, and delivery commitments.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder management skills in a global environment.
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What We Offer
• The opportunity to work on some of the world's most critical payment processing platforms.
• A collaborative, inclusive, and innovative engineering culture.
• The ability to influence modernization initiatives that shape the future of commerce.
• Career growth opportunities across technology domains, business units, and geographies.
• Access to learning and professional development opportunities to continuously build your skills.
• The opportunity to lead and develop talented engineers while driving meaningful technology outcomes.

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.