Lead AI Engineer: MCP & Open-Weight Model Platform

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

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