Principal AI Engineer

Mastercard; Ireland; On-site; EUR 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard is seeking an L5 Principal Engineer embedded within the BET organization to drive technology leadership for new business opportunities. You will shape hypotheses, assess feasibility, and guide complex architectures across teams.

You will mentor engineers, influence product partners, and ensure security, reliability, and scalable design while leveraging cloud and AI capabilities to accelerate value creation.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of full-stack engineering experience in an agile production environment.
• Strong backend engineering with Java, Kotlin, Python, Scala, or similar languages.
• Experience with LLMs, AI services, agent frameworks, workflow engines, or related technologies.
• Distributed production-grade software systems experience.
• Cloud expertise including AWS services for data-intensive apps.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of large, complex technical features spanning multiple teams.
• Guide architecture decisions and ensure alignment with Mastercard standards and security requirements.
• Mentor engineers and influence product and engineering partners.
• Evaluate build, buy, partner, or platform choices for new opportunities.
• Contribute to engineering standards and scalable frameworks.

Skills

Java

Kotlin

Python

Scala

Distributed systems

Full-stack engineering

AI/LLMs

Leadership

Communication

Cloud (AWS)

Security

Mentoring

API design

Data processing

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

Spark

SQL

Databricks

Snowflake

AWS EMR

Aurora

Job description

• BET (Business Expansion & Transformation) is B&MI’s innovation and growth organization responsible for sourcing, validating, incubating, and scaling new businesses, strategic bets, partnerships, and acquisitions that drive future revenue growth beyond the current portfolio
• Serve as the senior technology and architecture advisor for new business opportunities, ensuring technical feasibility, capability needs, and architecture implications are considered early in the opportunity lifecycle
• Partner with product, business, sourcing, and engineering teams to shape opportunity hypotheses, solution concepts, business cases, and early feasibility assessments.
  o Evaluate new ideas, market signals, emerging technology trends, and opportunity spaces through a technology, architecture, and capability lens.
  o Support the design and evolution of agentic and AI-enabled opportunity identification capabilities, including taxonomies, prompt architectures, agent workflows, evaluation frameworks, and supporting intelligence systems where relevant to the role
• Assess whether opportunities are best pursued through build, partner, invest, acquire, or discontinue pathways, and provide clear technical recommendations to support decision-making
• Challenge assumptions and identify material technical risks early, before significant resources are committed to development or deployment
• Guide architecture, platform, and capability decisions during incubation, prototype, market test, commercialization, and scale phases
• Identify common capabilities, platforms, architectural patterns, and reusable assets that can accelerate value creation across multiple opportunities.
• Define and maintain perspectives on relevant target-state architectures, including how future capabilities should be structured, integrated, governed, and scaled
• Help ensure solutions align with Mastercard technology standards, architecture expectations, operating requirements, security, reliability, and scale needs
• Mentor and influence engineers, architects, and product partners by contributing to shared engineering standards, architectural decisions, and technical decision quality

We are looking for an L5 Principal Engineer to serve as a dedicated technology leader embedded within the BET organization and an integral member of the BET Sourcing and Delivery teamBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experienceAbility to see both the business opportunity and the technical path forward, influencing what gets built as much as how it gets builtExperience operating systems with high reliability, availability, regulatory, security, compliance, and performance requirementsStrong backend engineering experience using languages such as Java, Kotlin, Python, Scala, or similar technologiesFamiliarity with orchestration patterns such as supervisors, routers, planners, stateful workflows, tool invocation, error handling, retries, and compensating actions in agent-driven workflowsExperience building or integrating systems that use LLMs, AI services, agent frameworks, workflow engines, orchestration platforms, or related technologiesSignificant professional experience building distributed, production-grade software systems, including 8 or more years of full-stack engineering experience in an agile production environmentStrong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and business stakeholdersExperience building and deploying production-level data-driven applications, data processing workflows, pipelines, or machine learning systems at scaleStrong collaboration skills with experience working across roles, teams, and geographiesStrong technical judgment and ability to evaluate tradeoffs across build, buy, partner, platform, architecture, scalability, integration, and operating model considerationsExperience leading the design and implementation of large, complex technical features or platforms that span multiple people, teams, or systemsAbility to work effectively in ambiguous problem spaces and evolve systems iteratively as business needs, technology maturity, and architectural direction become clearerDeep understanding of authentication, authorization, secure service-to-service communication, identity, permissions, and policy enforcementExperience coaching, mentoring, and influencing junior engineers, peers, and cross‑functional partnersCustomer-centric mindset, strong analytical and quantitative problem-solving skills, creativity, self‑direction, and comfort thriving in small, high‑impact project teamsHigh proficiency in using Python or Scala, Spark, SQLStrong understanding of APIs, services, asynchronous workflows, distributed systems, and enterprise‑grade software architectureProven ability to learn new technologies and frameworks, identify technical improvements, and contribute to engineering standards and architectural decisionsFamiliarity with cloud technologies and platforms, including but not limited to AWS EMR, Aurora, Databricks, and Snowflake, used to build and scale data‑intensive applications