Principal AI Engineer

Mastercard; Toronto; On-site; CAD 138,000 - 221,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard in Toronto seeks a Principal AI Engineer to design and deliver enterprise‑scale AI platform capabilities that help teams build, deploy, evaluate, and operate AI‑powered applications securely and reliably. This role combines deep software engineering with platform engineering and cloud architecture experience.

You will be a hands‑on technical leader, defining platform standards and driving implementation across application, infrastructure, and governance domains, while mentoring

Qualifications

• Proven ownership of platform or enterprise software from design to production.
• Mentor teams and drive technical excellence across an organization.
• Hands-on experience with Python and modern backend technologies.
• Experience designing APIs, distributed systems, and cloud‑native apps.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience operating on AWS, Azure, or GCP with Kubernetes and containers.
• Infrastructure as code experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, or Helm.

Responsibilities

• Design scalable architectures for AI apps, services, and data workloads.
• Build production‑grade backend services and platform components.
• Define platform patterns, reference architectures, and standards.
• Translate business requirements into secure, scalable solutions for governance reviews.
• Drive architectural decisions across services, data, performance, and security.
• Evolve cloud‑native foundations including Kubernetes and deployment automation.
• Establish observability, SLOs, capacity planning, and disaster recovery."
• Produce architecture diagrams and lead architecture reviews, security reviews, and governance.
• Contribute hands‑on through development, code reviews, and technical coaching.
• Evaluate emerging AI, cloud, and platform technologies for practical adoption.

Skills

Python

Backend development

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

Architecture leadership

Mentoring

Observability

Security

CI/CD

Distributed systems

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Helm

Job description

Title & Summary

Principal AI Engineer

Overview

Mastercard is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to design and deliver enterprise‑scale AI platform capabilities that help teams build, deploy, evaluate, and operate AI‑powered applications securely and reliably. This role combines deep software engineering expertise with platform engineering and cloud architecture experience. You will operate as a hands‑on technical leader responsible for designing scalable AI systems, defining platform standards, and driving implementation across application, infrastructure, and operational domains.

Role

• Design scalable architectures for AI applications, distributed services, APIs, event‑driven workflows, and data‑intensive workloads.
• Build production‑grade backend services, orchestration frameworks, and reusable platform components.
• Define platform patterns, reference architectures, and implementation standards that accelerate enterprise AI adoption.
• Translate ambiguous business and product requirements into secure, scalable technical solutions that can pass architecture, governance, and security review.
• Drive architectural decisions across service boundaries, data flows, performance, extensibility, reliability, and security.
• Design and evolve cloud‑native foundations, including Kubernetes, containers, networking, deployment automation, and infrastructure as code.
• Establish standards for observability, SLOs, deployment and rollback, capacity planning, resiliency, and disaster recovery.
• Produce architecture diagrams, flowcharts, and design documentation, and lead architecture, security, and governance reviews.
• Contribute hands‑on through development, code reviews, design reviews, and technical coaching.
• Evaluate emerging AI, cloud, and platform technologies and guide practical adoption decisions.

All About You

• Strong engineering experience designing, delivering, and operating large‑scale production systems.
• Proven ownership of complex platform, infrastructure, or enterprise software solutions from design through production.
• Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams and influencing architecture decisions at scale.
• Hands‑on experience with Python and modern backend technologies.
• Experience designing APIs, distributed systems, event‑driven architectures, and cloud‑native applications.
• Strong understanding of software design principles, testing strategies, CI/CD, and continuous delivery practices.
• Deep experience operating systems on AWS, Azure, or GCP, with hands‑on Kubernetes, containers, and cloud‑native architecture experience.
• Experience with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, or similar technologies.
• Understanding of modern GenAI application patterns, including RAG, evaluation frameworks, prompt engineering, AI observability, model lifecycle management, and agents or agent orchestration.
• Strong knowledge of networking, identity, security, reliability, monitoring, incident management, and operational readiness practices.
• Ability to present, promote, defend, and demonstrate technical solutions to engineers, architects, product leaders, security partners, governance bodies, and executive stakeholders.
• Track record of mentoring teams and driving technical excellence across an organization.

Preferred

• Experience building enterprise AI platforms, GenAI solutions, or developer platforms.
• Experience with AI observability and evaluation platforms.
• Experience with fintech, regulated environments, or enterprise security and governance processes.
• Experience supporting highly regulated or high‑security environments.

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.

Corporate Security Responsibility

• 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.

Pay Ranges

Toronto, Canada: $138,000 - $221,000 CAD