Senior Solutions Architect

Solution Architect

Location: NYC, US

Job Type: Full-Time or Contract

About the Role:

We're looking for a Solution Architect who is a true thought leader and practitioner in distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, and large-scale payment platforms. You will partner across product, engineering, and architecture teams to define and document reference architectures, drive standards, and deliver resilient, performant, scalable, and secure systems. You'll combine deep technical hands-on experience with strategic vision, translating business goals into real architecture solutions and influencing across the organization.

You'll work closely with principal architects, engineering managers, and product leaders to define how Mastercard delivers low-latency, high-throughput, fault-tolerant platform at global scale.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect end-to-end payment and platform systems (on-premises, hybrid, cloud-native) that meet demands of low latency, high throughput, resilience, security, and data privacy.
• Define and promote architecture principles, reference models, patterns (e.g., microservices, event sourcing, CQRS, async & sync messaging, domain-driven design) and guide teams in adoption.
• Document architecture using modern modelling tools and techniques (e.g., C4, UML, deployment/sequence/data diagrams); ensure architecture artifacts are clear, actionable and accessible to engineering and product teams.
• Evaluate design trade-offs (latency vs throughput vs cost; consistency vs availability; complexity vs maintainability; security vs usability) and make decisions transparently.
• Be highly hands-on: able to dig into Java/Spring Boot microservices, event flows, integration architectures, observability, failure handling and recovery strategies.
• Collaborate closely with product leadership to translate roadmap items (e.g., tokenization, passkeys, BNPL) into architecture design, providing options, implications and trade-off analysis.
• Provide mentorship and leadership in architecture governance: review design proposals, perform risk assessments, drive architectural reviews, lead a Center of Excellence for architecture practices.
• Engage across engineering domains: partner with cloud, infrastructure, security, devops, data teams to ensure architecture meets cross-cutting non-functional requirements and is delivery-ready.
• Drive innovation: explore new open-source technologies, event frameworks, data streaming, AI/ML integration, real-time analytics and bring pragmatic proposals into the platform roadmap.
• Influence culture: promote architecture best practices, drive continuous improvement, contribute to knowledge-sharing forums, build architecture community within the organization.

Required Skills & Experience:

• 15 + years of professional experience in software engineering and architecture roles, with extensive hands-on coding and systems design.
• Deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot microservices, event-driven systems (e.g., using Kafka, Axon, etc.), synchronous and asynchronous communications, domain-driven design.
• Strong knowledge of distributed system design: high throughput, low latency, fail-fast, resilient architectures, graceful degradation, fault isolation.
• Experience in cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and hybrid cloud / on-prem integrations.
• Skilled in architecture modelling and documentation using modern tools and frameworks (C4, UML, etc.).
• Excellent understanding of integration patterns, messaging, service orchestration, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), caching, databases (SQL & NoSQL).
• Proven capability to articulate design trade-offs, influence senior stakeholders (engineering leads, product leadership, executives) and lead architecture decisions.
• Strong communication skills: ability to simplify complex architecture concepts, present to non-technical audiences (product/business) and collaborate effectively with engineering teams.
• Experience in payments, fintech, commerce platforms or similarly complex, regulated, high-scale systems is highly desirable.
• Proven track record of setting standards, leading architecture practice, mentoring teams, driving governance and improving architectural maturity in an organization.