Lead AI Engineer: Scale Open-Weight Models & MCP

Mastercard Inc.; Town/Village of Harrison (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 277,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to join a focused AI technology team. You will design and build platform capabilities to adopt MCP and open weight models at scale, working with senior engineers and governance stakeholders to ensure secure, production‑grade services.

The role is hands‑on and requires strong AI knowledge, modern software engineering, and robust MLOps practices across cloud platforms.

Qualifications

• Strong knowledge of modern AI technology: LLMs and foundation models, agents, and the tooling and protocols (such as MCP) that connect them to enterprise systems.
• Good software engineering skills: you write production‑quality, well‑tested code and build services others can depend on, not one‑off scripts or prototypes.
• Solid MLOps experience: CI/CD, infrastructure‑as‑code, containers, observability, and monitoring for models and services in production.
• Good cloud platform knowledge (AWS preferred; Azure or GCP valuable). Familiarity with a modern data/AI platform such as Databricks a bonus.
• Practical experience with model evaluation, including building benchmarks and tests that measure quality, cost, latency and safety, and producing reproducible results others can rely on.
• Hands‑on experience serving or operating open weight models, self‑hosting, and scaling inference, and ideally some fine‑tuning or adaptation to proprietary data and workflows.
• Working knowledge of API security, identity, and access control, enough to implement MCP authentication and authorization correctly and partner effectively with security teams.
• Awareness of the governance context that shapes enterprise AI, such as model provenance and licensing, data sovereignty, and financial‑services regulation.
• A clear communicator and collaborator who works well with senior engineers, hands‑on peers, and specialist governance and security partner teams.
• Intense curiosity about technology in general, and AI in particular, and who can demonstrate their learning agility outside the bounds of a specific function.
• Lastly, a self‑starter: once you have a clear guidance and direction, you don’t need to be hand‑held to get to a solution or deliverable.

Job description

Mastercard is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to join a focused AI technology team. You will design and build platform capabilities to adopt MCP and open weight models at scale, working with senior engineers and governance stakeholders to ensure secure, production‑grade services.

The role is hands‑on and requires strong AI knowledge, modern software engineering, and robust MLOps practices across cloud platforms.