Lead, Platform Engineer (Network Site Reliability Engineering)

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, Platform Engineer (Network Site Reliability Engineering) About the Role The Lead Network Site Reliability Engineer - is a senior reliability engineer who improves the availability, scalability, security, and operability of global network services. The role combines deep networking knowledge with software engineering, AI-assisted operations, infrastructure automation, and modern delivery practices to reduce manual effort, prevent incidents, and accelerate safe change. This engineer acts as a force multiplier across SRE, Network Engineering, and Network Operations. They turn operational knowledge into reusable code, automated workflows, policy checks, observability patterns, and self-service capabilities. They also help teams apply AI and machine learning responsibly to detect anomalies, correlate signals, summarize operational context, and recommend or automate low-risk remediation with appropriate human oversight. The role is vendor-neutral and spans routing, switching, firewalls, load balancing, software-defined networking, cloud networking, and network observability. Success requires systems thinking, strong engineering discipline, and the ability to influence standards and delivery practices across multiple teams. Key Responsibilities • Lead reliability engineering for network services by identifying systemic risks, recurring failure modes, capacity constraints, and opportunities to improve resilience. • Design and deliver network automation using Python, APIs, infrastructure-as-code, configuration-as-code, and event-driven workflows. • Build and improve CI/CD pipelines for network changes, including linting, unit and integration tests, policy validation, security checks, approvals, staged deployment, rollback, and post-change verification. • Create automated pre-change and post-change testing to validate reachability, routing, configuration intent, telemetry, performance, and service health. • Apply AI-assisted operations to anomaly detection, incident correlation, troubleshooting, knowledge retrieval, change-risk analysis, and remediation recommendations while maintaining security, auditability, and human control. • Develop reusable network data models, source-of-truth integrations, templates, and automation libraries that reduce configuration drift and improve consistency across environments. • Advance network observability through high-quality metrics, logs, traces, flow data, synthetic tests, topology context, service-level indicators, dashboards, and actionable alerting. • Partner with Network Engineering and Operations to embed reliability, testability, telemetry, and automation requirements into platform roadmaps and operational readiness reviews. • Improve developer and operator experience through self-service workflows, documented golden paths, runbooks, and safe automation that reduces dependency on individual experts. • Mentor engineers in network reliability, software engineering, CI/CD, automation testing, observability, and responsible use of AI. • Evaluate emerging network, automation, and AI technologies and translate relevant capabilities into practical reliability improvements. All about You: • Strong experience designing, operating, troubleshooting, or supporting large-scale production networks. • Deep understanding of core networking concepts and protocols, including TCP/IP, routing, switching, DNS, NAT, load balancing, network security, and high-availability design. • Hands-on programming or scripting experience with Python, Go, Bash, or a similar language, including API integration and structured data formats such as JSON or YAML. • Experience with network automation or infrastructure-as-code tools and practices, such as Ansible, Terraform, Git-based workflows, templating, or vendor APIs. • Experience with observability platforms and the practical use of telemetry to detect, diagnose, and prevent reliability issues. • Background in Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, network engineering, or infrastructure operations. • Demonstrated ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives, communicate clearly with engineering and operations stakeholders, and drive durable improvements. • Experience applying AI, machine learning, or large language models to operational use cases such as anomaly detection, event correlation, knowledge search, incident assistance, or change-risk analysis. Preferred Qualifications • Experience with network test and validation frameworks, digital twins, lab automation, synthetic monitoring, or intent-based networking. • Knowledge of cloud networking, containers, Kubernetes networking, service mesh, software-defined networking, or network virtualization. • Experience defining service-level indicators, service-level objectives, error budgets, capacity models, and reliability metrics for network services. 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.