Lead Software Engineer

Lead MQ Engineer

Overview

Mastercard Lead MQ Engineer Role Overview. 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 solve real business problems and deliver value to customers with security and performance.

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…