Lead Data Engineer for Foundation AI Pipelines

Mastercard; Ireland; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to design, build, and operate the data foundations that power a strategic AI program within the AI & Data organization. You will own end‑to‑end data engineering delivery, partnering with AI engineers, software engineers, and product teams to ensure production‑ready pipelines, feature assets, and analytics datasets.

You will mentor senior and mid‑level data engineers, drive data quality, governance, and scalable architectures, and help shape enterprise

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in computer science, engineering, or a related field.
• Experience leading technical delivery and mentoring engineers.
• Clear, concise communicator able to collaborate with engineers, data scientists, product managers and stakeholders.
• Deep expertise with distributed data processing frameworks (e.g. Spark or equivalent) and SQL‑based analytics.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including version control, testing, CI/CD, and code quality standards.
• Solid understanding of data modeling, performance tuning, and cost‑efficient data architecture.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate data foundations powering an AI program.
• Own end‑to‑end data engineering delivery across the program.
• Lead development and operation of data pipelines and data products for model training, inference, and evaluation.
• Ingest, transform, and aggregate data across batch and streaming workloads.
• Mentor senior and mid‑level data engineers and provide technical direction.
• Collaborate with platform/infrastructure teams to meet enterprise standards for quality, governance, and security.

Skills

Spark

SQL analytics

Data governance

CI/CD

Data modeling

Cloud platforms

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Job description

Mastercard is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to design, build, and operate the data foundations that power a strategic AI program within the AI & Data organization. You will own end‑to‑end data engineering delivery, partnering with AI engineers, software engineers, and product teams to ensure production‑ready pipelines, feature assets, and analytics datasets.

You will mentor senior and mid‑level data engineers, drive data quality, governance, and scalable architectures, and help shape enterprise