Lead AI Engineer: Open Weight Models & MCP Platform

US: Mastercard International Incor; Purchase (NY); On-site; USD 161,000 - 266,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to join a focused AI technology team working on agentic technologies such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and open weight models. You will design and build platform capabilities to adopt MCP and open weights at scale, collaborating with senior engineers, security, governance, and central technology teams.

This hands‑on role emphasizes production‑grade services, scalable model serving, and robust evaluation tooling, with a strong focus on security,

Qualifications

• Strong knowledge of modern AI technology: LLMs, agents, and MCP.
• Solid software engineering: production‑quality, well‑tested code.
• Hands‑on MLOps: CI/CD, IaC, observability, monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Design and build enterprise MCP deployment components (security gateway, MCP registry, reference servers).
• Implement identity, authentication, and authorization patterns across the MCP estate.
• Define and enforce gateway controls: exposure, discovery, versioning, data protection, rate limiting, kill-switches.
• Build and operate open weight model serving with self‑hosting and scalable inference.
• Develop benchmarks for model quality, cost, latency, and safety for governance.

Skills

AI engineering

MLOps

Cloud AWS

Open weights

MCP

Model evaluation

Security governance

Tools

Databricks

Job description

Mastercard is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to join a focused AI technology team working on agentic technologies such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and open weight models. You will design and build platform capabilities to adopt MCP and open weights at scale, collaborating with senior engineers, security, governance, and central technology teams.

This hands‑on role emphasizes production‑grade services, scalable model serving, and robust evaluation tooling, with a strong focus on security,