Principal Product Manager – Technical (Real‑time Payments)

About the role

The Principal Product Manager – Technical will join Mastercard’s Reactive Systems Architecture (RSA) team, which powers the company’s real‑time, event‑driven payment platforms. You will partner with application teams to design, build and operate mission‑critical payment services that run at global scale with high throughput, low latency and strong resilience.

Key responsibilities

• Develop deep customer empathy and translate market dynamics into product vision.
• Lead multiple teams in adopting lean product management practices and maintain a domain roadmap.
• Translate product requirements into epics, features and user stories with clear, measurable outcomes.
• Prioritise backlogs with product owners, ensuring alignment with business value.
• Advocate an agile mindset across the product lifecycle, from epic definition to acceptance criteria.
• Collaborate with engineering to design and build product components as a unified agile team.
• Coordinate with cross‑functional groups to manage dependencies, minimise time‑to‑market and reduce errors.
• Oversee delivery, testing and operational health of the domain, escalating critical issues as needed.
• Measure outcomes, conduct post‑launch reviews and drive continuous improvement.

Required profile

• Proven product management experience delivering high‑quality products in the payments industry.
• Strong background in lean product management and agile delivery (scrum, Kanban, CI/CD, DevOps).
• Track record of taking features from design through deployment and customer integration.
• Data‑driven mindset with ability to define SMART metrics for backlog items.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work with globally distributed teams.
• Experience leading and influencing both direct reports and cross‑functional partners.
• Bachelor’s degree; payments expertise is a plus.

Required skills

• Kafka (event‑streaming platform)
• NATS messaging system
• CI/CD pipelines
• DevOps practices
• Test‑Driven Development (TDD)
• Behavior‑Driven Development (BDD)
• Scrum
• Kanban