Lead Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

About the role

Mastercard's Program-aligned Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams maintain the infrastructure and technology ecosystem behind its programs, keeping them compliant with strict security requirements. This Lead Engineer role sits within the Payments Network SRE team, which is responsible for the runtime availability of some of Mastercard's most critical core payment systems, operating 24/7. You will assess and improve end-to-end service quality, use data to drive root cause analysis, and give stakeholders insight into resource utilization, capacity forecasting and performance trends.

Key responsibilities

• Lead continuous assessments of the infrastructure supporting critical applications, covering health, performance, monitoring, alerting and capacity analysis.
• Work with Product and Development teams to forecast growth needs and ensure scalability and resiliency.
• Champion observability by finding gaps in monitoring and alerting, integrating telemetry into a single view and building custom dashboards for root cause analysis.
• Run regular incident reviews, and develop strategies to fix or mitigate recurring failures and compatibility issues.
• Use automation and AI to detect issues proactively and enable self-healing, reducing MTTD and MTTM.
• Build testing and validation plans for new builds, disaster recovery exercises and post-maintenance activities.
• Lead training on networking aspects of the platforms and evaluate vendor upgrade roadmaps with POC testing.

Required profile

• 5-10 years in an SRE or related operations role, including 3+ years supporting e-commerce, financial services or large-scale SaaS platforms.
• Experience partnering with development teams to shape architecture, define SLIs/SLOs and embed reliability from design to operation.
• Ability to coordinate cross-functional troubleshooting and lead RCA processes to closure.
• Periodic on-call duties when required.

Required skills

• Hands-on observability and monitoring tools such as Splunk, Dynatrace or equivalents.
• Network telemetry tools such as SolarWinds and NetScout.
• Packet-level debugging with tcpdump and Wireshark.
• Infrastructure as Code tools such as Chef, Ansible and Terraform, and JSON/YAML.
• Monitoring ecosystems including Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Splunk and OpenTelemetry.