Lead AI Platform Engineer - Open Weight Models & Security

Mastercard Inc.; O’Fallon (MO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 277,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Insurance (medical, dental, vision)

Paid time off

401k with company match

Tuition reimbursement

On-site fitness facilities

Job summary

Mastercard Inc. is seeking an experienced AI platform engineer to design and operate enterprise MCP deployment components, including a security gateway, MCP registry, and reference server implementations.

You will drive implementations from design to production, implement identity and access controls, and ensure secure, auditable data and tools across the MCP estate while building open weight model serving and reproducible evaluation tooling.

Qualifications

• Strong knowledge of modern AI tech including LLMs and enterprise tooling.
• Production-grade software engineering practices and reliable services.
• MLOps experience covering CI/CD, IaC, containers, observability, and monitoring.
• Cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP valuable) and Databricks.
• Model evaluation with reproducible results (quality, cost, latency, safety).
• Hands-on open weight model operations with self-hosted inference.
• API security and access control for MCP authentication/authorization.
• Governance concepts: provenance, licensing, data sovereignty, finance regs.
• Strong communication and collaboration with engineers and security partners.
• Self-motivated, able to work with minimal hand-holding.

Responsibilities

• Design and build MCP deployment components, including a security gateway and MCP registry.
• Drive implementations from design to running production services.
• Implement identity, auth, and authorization patterns for MCP across the estate.
• Ensure agent, tool, and data access is secure and auditable end to end.
• Define MCP server standards for exposure, discovery, versioning, and controls.
• Build and operate open weight model serving with self-hosted inference and packaging.
• Create evaluation tooling benchmarking models for quality, cost, latency, and safety.
• Apply MLOps: CI/CD, IaC, observability, and monitoring for models and services.
• Partner with security, privacy, legal, AI governance teams, and MCP groups.
• Stay current with MCP developments and decide on adoption.

Skills

AI knowledge

Software engineering

MLOps

Model evaluation

Open weight ops

API security

Governance

Communication

Learning agility

Self-starter

Tools

OAuth

Databricks

AWS

Azure

GCP

CI/CD

IaC

Containers

Observability

Self-hosted inference

Job description

Mastercard Inc. is seeking an experienced AI platform engineer to design and operate enterprise MCP deployment components, including a security gateway, MCP registry, and reference server implementations.

You will drive implementations from design to production, implement identity and access controls, and ensure secure, auditable data and tools across the MCP estate while building open weight model serving and reproducible evaluation tooling.