Lead AI Engineer
About The Position
Mastercard is seeking a Lead AI Engineer for a small AI technology team led by a Distinguished Engineer. The team is focused initially on delivering agentic technologies, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP) at scale, and enabling the use of open weight AI models. This is a hands-on engineering role working with senior engineers and technology stakeholders across the organization to design and build secure, scalable, production-grade platform capabilities. The role contributes to enterprise patterns for exposing tools and data to agents over MCP, and for serving, evaluating, and governing open weight models. It includes work on gateway and connectivity patterns, identity and access controls, model-serving infrastructure, and evaluation. The engineer partners with the MCP estate, the open weight model working group, and central technology, security, privacy, legal, and governance stakeholders. The successful candidate will turn technical direction and partner requirements into maintainable, production-ready services, while keeping current with developments in MCP, open weight models, and related agentic protocols.
Requirements
- Strong knowledge of modern AI technology, including LLMs and foundation models, agents, and tools and protocols such as MCP that connect them to enterprise systems.
- Strong software engineering skills, including writing production-quality, well-tested code and building dependable services.
- Solid MLOps experience, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containers, observability, and production monitoring for models and services.
- Good cloud platform knowledge; AWS is preferred, and Azure or GCP experience is valuable.
- Practical model evaluation experience, including building benchmarks and tests for quality, cost, latency, and safety, and producing reproducible results.
- Hands-on experience serving or operating open weight models, self-hosting, and scaling inference.
- Working knowledge of API security, identity, and access control sufficient to implement MCP authentication and authorization and work effectively with security teams.
- Clear communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to work with senior engineers, hands-on peers, and governance and security partners.
- Curiosity about technology and AI, with learning agility beyond a specific function.
- Self-starter who can work toward a solution or deliverable once given clear guidance and direction.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with a modern data or AI platform such as Databricks.
- Experience with Azure or GCP cloud platforms.
- Experience fine-tuning or adapting open weight models to proprietary data and workflows.
- Awareness of enterprise AI governance topics such as model provenance and licensing, data sovereignty, and financial-services regulation.
Responsibilities
- Design and build components of Mastercard’s enterprise MCP deployment, including a security gateway, MCP registry, and reference server implementations, taking them from design through production operation.
- Implement identity, authentication, and authorization patterns for MCP in partnership with senior engineers and central security and identity teams, ensuring secure and auditable access to agents, tools, and data.
- Establish and apply standards for internal and external MCP servers, including how tools and data are exposed, discovered, and versioned, and gateway controls for inspection, data protection, rate limiting, and kill switches.
- Build and operate open weight model serving, including self-hosted inference, model packaging and deployment, scaling, and support for switching workloads across models and providers.
- Build evaluation and testing tools to benchmark open weight models for quality, cost, latency, and safety, and produce reproducible evidence for governance and security reviews.
- Apply MLOps practices including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, and model and service monitoring to keep platform services reliable and operable in production.
- Partner with central security, privacy, legal, and AI governance teams, as well as the MCP SIG and open weight working group, to implement requirements in the platform architecture.
- Track developments in MCP, open weight models, and related agentic protocols, and help assess what to adopt, prototype, or defer.
- Follow Mastercard security policies, protect the confidentiality and integrity of accessed information, report suspected security violations or breaches, and complete mandatory security training.
Benefits
- Medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance
- Flexible spending account and health savings account
- Paid leaves, including 16 weeks of new parent leave and up to 20 days of bereavement leave
- 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time
- 25 days of vacation time and 5 personal days, prorated based on date of hire
- 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays
- 401(k) with a company match
- Deferred compensation for eligible roles
- Fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities
- Tuition reimbursement eligibility
- Potential eligibility for an annual bonus or commissions, depending on the role
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
