Lead AI Engineer

Mastercard Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to join a focused AI technology team led by one of Mastercard's Distinguished Engineers. The team will focus on agentic technologies such as the Model Context Protocol at scale and the use of open weight AI models, working closely with stakeholders across the organization.

This is a hands-on role where you design and build platform capabilities that let Mastercard adopt MCP and open weight models safely and at scale, collaborating with more senior

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design and build of Mastercard's enterprise MCP deployment components, including security gateway, MCP registry, and reference servers, from design to production.
• Implement identity, authentication, and authorization patterns for MCP across the estate with security and identity teams to ensure auditable access to tools and data.
• Define and apply standards for internal and external MCP servers—discovery, versioning, inspection, data protection, rate-limiting, and gateway kill-switch controls.
• Build and operate self-hosted open weight model serving, enable scalable inference, package models for deployment, and support switching workloads across models/providers.
• Create evaluation/testing tooling to benchmark open weight models for quality, cost, latency, and safety with reproducible governance evidence.
• Apply MLOps practices (CI/CD, infra-as-code, observability, monitoring) to keep the platform reliable in production.
• Collaborate with central security and governance teams to ensure compliant MCP deployment

Job description

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we're helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we're helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Title And Summary

Lead AI Engineer

Overview

Mastercard is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to join a small, focused AI technology team led by one of Mastercard's Distinguished Engineers. The team will initially focus on delivering agentic technologies such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) at scale and the use of open weight AI models. The team works in partnership with key technology stakeholders across the organization.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will design and build the platform capabilities that let Mastercard adopt MCP and open weight models safely and at scale, working alongside more senior engineers who set the broader technical direction. We are looking for someone with strong knowledge of modern AI technology, solid software engineering and MLOps skills, good cloud platform experience, familiarity with identity technologies such as OAuth and a practical grasp of model evaluation.

In this role, you will help build the platform patterns through which Mastercard teams expose tools and data to agents over MCP, and through which the enterprise services, evaluates, and governs open weight models. You will contribute to the key technical decisions - gateway and connectivity patterns, identity and access controls, model-serving infrastructure, and evaluation - and turn them into working, well-engineered, production-grade services. You will work across the MCP estate and the OW model working group, partnering closely with the team's senior engineers and with central technology, security, and governance stakeholders.

About The Role

• Contribute to the design and build of the components of Mastercard's enterprise MCP deployment, such as the security gateway, the MCP registry that governs what exists and who owns it, and reference server implementations that teams build from. Take these from design through to running production services.
• Implement the identity, authentication, and authorization patterns for MCP across the estate, working with the team's senior engineers and central security and identity teams so that agents, tools, and data are accessed securely and are auditable end to end.
• Help set and apply the standard for internal and external MCP servers - how tools and data are exposed, discovered and versioned, and the inspection, data-protection, rate-limiting, and kill-switch controls the gateway must enforce.
• Build and operate open weight model serving - stand up and scale self-hosted inference, package models for deployment, and help enable switching workloads across models and providers for cost, flexibility, and resilience.
• Build the evaluation and testing tooling that benchmarks candidate open weight models for quality, cost, latency, and safety, and produces the reproducible evidence that governance and security reviews need.
• Apply the MLOps practices that keep the platform reliable - CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and model and service monitoring - so that what the team builds is maintainable and operable in production.
• Partner with central security