Lead AI Platform Engineer – MCP & Open Weight Models

Mastercard Inc.; Arlington (VA); On-site; USD 161,000 - 266,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard seeks a Lead AI Engineer to join a focused AI tech team building agentic technologies like MCP at scale. You will design platform patterns for exposing tools and data to agents, govern model evaluation, and ensure secure, auditable access across enterprise services.

The role requires strong AI/ML engineering skills, hands‑on experience with open weight models, cloud platforms, and robust MLOps practices.

Qualifications

• Strong knowledge of modern AI technology: LLMs and foundation models.
• Hands-on experience with agents and the tooling/protocols (MCP) connecting them to enterprise systems.
• Solid MLOps experience: CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and model/service monitoring.
• Good cloud platform knowledge (AWS preferred; Azure or GCP valuable).
• Familiarity with identity technologies such as OAuth and a practical grasp of model evaluation.
• Hands-on experience serving or operating open weight models and self-hosting inference.

Responsibilities

• Design and build Mastercard's enterprise MCP deployment components (e.g., security gateway, MCP registry) from design to production.
• Implement MCP authentication and authorization patterns across the estate with security teams.
• Define and enforce MCP server standards for tool exposure, discovery, versioning, and controls.
• Build and operate open weight model serving with self-hosted inference and scalable workloads.
• Develop evaluation tooling to benchmark models for quality, cost, latency and safety with reproducible results.
• Apply MLOps practices to keep the platform reliable (CI/CD, IaC, observability).
• Collaborate with security, privacy, legal and AI governance teams and with MCP/SIG groups.
• Stay current with MCP developments and related agentic protocols to guide adoption.

Skills

LLMs & foundation models

Agents & protocols

MLOps

Cloud platforms

Identity & access controls

Software engineering

Tools

OAuth

Databricks

Job description

Mastercard seeks a Lead AI Engineer to join a focused AI tech team building agentic technologies like MCP at scale. You will design platform patterns for exposing tools and data to agents, govern model evaluation, and ensure secure, auditable access across enterprise services.

The role requires strong AI/ML engineering skills, hands‑on experience with open weight models, cloud platforms, and robust MLOps practices.