Lead AI Engineer

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.

Overview

As a Lead AI Engineer at Mastercard, you will serve as the platform support lead for our agentic use cases, designing, building, and scaling AI micro services that transform PoC notebooks into robust, production ready components. Working very closely with data scientists and cross functional partners, you will enable the delivery of agentic solutions that power our next generation offerings, ensuring they are scalable, efficient, and seamlessly integrated into the broader Mastercard ecosystem. This role offers a fantastic opportunity for anyone eager to learn, grow, and become a recognized expert in the emerging field of agentic AI.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide platform level support for agentic use cases, helping teams adopt standards, tooling, and governance that enable rapid development and deployment across the organization.
• Lead the end to end design and development of AI powered microservices, focusing on modularity, scalability, and reusability to support various business units and applications.
• Drive the transition of AI models from notebook based Po Cs and experimental phases into hardened, production grade components and services, ensuring performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Design and implement robust APIs for AI microservices, facilitating seamless integration with existing Mastercard platforms and external systems.
• Identify and address performance bottlenecks within AI microservices and their underlying infrastructure, optimizing for latency, throughput, and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate closely with data scientists, MLOps engineers, product owners, and external partners to translate business requirements into technical specifications for agentic AI services.
• Mentor junior engineers on best practices for AI software development and scaling.
• Implement rigorous testing strategies, including unit, integration, and performance testing, to ensure the quality, accuracy, and stability of deployed AI microservices.
• Research and evaluate new technologies, frameworks, and methodologies related to AI software development, microservices, and large scale data processing to continuously improve our capabilities.
• Ensure all AI microservices adhere to Mastercard's security standards, compliance policies, and ethical AI principles.

Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field. Master's degree preferred.

Experience

• Minimum of 8+ years in software development, with at least 4 years focused on building and deploying AI/ML powered applications or microservices in production environments.

Technical Skills

• Strong proficiency in Python.
• Extensive experience designing, developing, and deploying RESTful APIs and microservices.
• Proven experience scaling machine learning models from prototype to production, including familiarity with feature stores, model registries, and inference patterns.
• Solid understanding of the AI/ML lifecycle, from data preparation and model training to deployment and monitoring.
• Experience with cloud platforms and their relevant compute, storage, and AI/ML services.
• Proficiency with containerization technologies.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment of software and AI models.
• Experience with distributed computing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Dask) is a plus.
• Understanding of data governance, data quality, and data security principles relevant to AI/ML applications.
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to effectively articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non technical audiences.
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives, drive cross functional projects, and influence outcomes within a fast paced environment.

Equal Opportunity

Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application, please contact us.