Principal AI Engineer — Architecture & AI Innovation Leader

Mastercard; Greystones; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard in Ireland seeks a Principal Engineer to lead technical strategy within the BET Sourcing and Delivery team. You will champion architecture, guide platform decisions, and mentor engineers across multiple domains while aligning with Mastercard standards and security practices.

You will shape opportunities, evaluate tradeoffs, and influence both business and technical directions to drive scalable, data-driven outcomes at global scale.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Extensive experience building distributed, production-grade software systems in agile environments.
• Strong backend engineering with Java, Kotlin, Python, or Scala.
• Proven leadership in designing large, cross-team technical features.
• Ability to balance business opportunities with technical viability.

Responsibilities

• Serve as senior technology and architecture advisor for new business opportunities.
• Partner with product, business, sourcing, and engineering to shape hypotheses and business cases.
• Evaluate ideas through technology, architecture, and capability lenses.
• Support design of agentic and AI-enabled opportunity identification capabilities.
• Assess build, partner, invest, or acquire pathways with clear technical recommendations.
• Mentor engineers and influence engineering standards and decisions.
• Guide architecture decisions through incubation, prototyping, testing, and scale.
• Identify common capabilities and reusable assets to accelerate value creation.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

Backend engineering

Java

Kotlin

Python

Scala

Architectural leadership

Cloud platforms

LLMs AI services

API design

Data processing

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

Spark

SQL

Python

Scala

AWS

Databricks

Snowflake

Job description

Mastercard in Ireland seeks a Principal Engineer to lead technical strategy within the BET Sourcing and Delivery team. You will champion architecture, guide platform decisions, and mentor engineers across multiple domains while aligning with Mastercard standards and security practices.

You will shape opportunities, evaluate tradeoffs, and influence both business and technical directions to drive scalable, data-driven outcomes at global scale.