Principal AI Engineer

Mastercard; Bray (OK); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard seeks a Level 5 Principal Engineer to lead technology and architecture within BET, embedded in sourcing and delivery. You will shape opportunity hypotheses, evaluate tech trends, and drive AI-enabled capabilities across initiatives.

You will mentor engineers, influence architectural decisions, and ensure alignment with security, scale, and enterprise standards while collaborating with product, data, and engineering teams worldwide.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of distributed, production-grade software development in an agile environment.
• Strong backend experience with Java, Kotlin, Python, Scala, or equivalent.
• Experience guiding architecture for large, multi-team platforms.
• Experience with AI/LLM-enabled workflows and secure, scalable systems.

Responsibilities

• Serve as senior technology and architecture advisor for new business opportunities.
• Partner with product, business, sourcing, and engineering to shape hypotheses and business cases.
• Evaluate ideas, market signals, and technology trends for opportunities.
• Support design and evolution of agentic and AI-enabled capabilities and workflows.
• Assess build/partner/invest/discard pathways with clear technical recommendations.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to engineering standards and decisions.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Java

Kotlin

Python

Scala

API design

Cloud platforms

AI integration

Security and identity

Mentoring

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

AWS

Spark

SQL

Databricks

Snowflake

Job description

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we're helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Who is Mastercard?

Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry, building digital platforms that securely power commerce at global scale. Our technology enables innovation across financial services, data, AI, and digital experiences, while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, security, and trust.

Business & Market Insights (B&MI) is Mastercard's data, analytics, and intelligence organization, responsible for transforming vast, global data assets into actionable insights and decision support products for customers across industries. B&MI builds platforms and products that move beyond static analytics, embedding AI, advanced modeling, and increasingly agentic systems directly into customer workflows to help clients understand what is happening, what will happen next, and what actions to take. The team operates on a global scale, where product, engineering, and data teams come together to deliver secure, governed, and production ready intelligence solutions that drive measurable business outcomes.

Role Summary

BET (Business Expansion & Transformation) is B&MI's innovation and growth organization responsible for sourcing, validating, incubating, and scaling new businesses, strategic bets, partnerships, and acquisitions that drive future revenue growth beyond the current portfolio.

We are looking for an L5 Principal Engineer to serve as a dedicated technology leader embedded within the BET organization and an integral member of the BET Sourcing and Delivery team.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Serve as the senior technology and architecture advisor for new business opportunities, ensuring technical feasibility, capability needs, and architecture implications are considered early in the opportunity lifecycle.
• Partner with product, business, sourcing, and engineering teams to shape opportunity hypotheses, solution concepts, business cases, and early feasibility assessments.
  • Evaluate new ideas, market signals, emerging technology trends, and opportunity spaces through a technology, architecture, and capability lens.
  • Support the design and evolution of agentic and AI-enabled opportunity identification capabilities, including taxonomies, prompt architectures, agent workflows, evaluation frameworks, and supporting intelligence systems where relevant to the role.
• Assess whether opportunities are best pursued through build, partner, invest, acquire, or discontinue pathways, and provide clear technical recommendations to support decision-making.
• Challenge assumptions and identify material technical risks early, before significant resources are committed to development or deployment.
• Guide architecture, platform, and capability decisions during incubation, prototype, market test, commercialization, and scale phases.
• Identify common capabilities, platforms, architectural patterns, and reusable assets that can accelerate value creation across multiple opportunities.
  • Define and maintain perspectives on relevant target-state architectures, including how future capabilities should be structured, integrated, governed, and scaled.
  • Help ensure solutions align with Mastercard technology standards, architecture expectations, operating requirements, security, reliability, and scale needs.
  • Mentor and influence engineers, architects, and product partners by contributing to shared engineering standards, architectural decisions, and technical decision quality.

Required Skills and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Significant professional experience building distributed, production-grade software systems, including 8 or more years of full-stack engineering experience in an agile production environment.
• Strong backend engineering experience using languages such as Java, Kotlin, Python, Scala, or similar technologies.
• Experience leading the design and implementation of large, complex technical features or platforms that span multiple people, teams, or systems.
• Ability to see both the business opportunity and the technical path forward, influencing what gets built as much as how it gets built.
• Strong understanding of APIs, services, asynchronous workflows, distributed systems, and enterprise-grade software architecture.
• Deep understanding of authentication, authorization, secure service-to-service communication, identity, permissions, and policy enforcement.
• Experience operating systems with high reliability, availability, regulatory, security, compliance, and performance requirements.
• Experience building or integrating systems that use LLMs, AI services, agent frameworks, workflow engines, orchestration platforms, or related technologies.
• Familiarity with orchestration patterns such as supervisors, routers, planners, stateful workflows, tool invocation, error handling, retries, and compensating actions in agent-driven workflows.
• High proficiency in using Python or Scala, Spark, SQL.
• Familiarity with cloud technologies and platforms, including but not limited to AWS EMR, Aurora, Databricks, and Snowflake, used to build and scale data-intensive applications.
• Experience building and deploying production-level data-driven applications, data processing workflows, pipelines, or machine learning systems at scale.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to evaluate tradeoffs across build, buy, partner, platform, architecture, scalability, integration, and operating model considerations.
• Ability to work effectively in ambiguous problem spaces and evolve systems iteratively as business needs, technology maturity, and architectural direction become clearer.
• Proven ability to learn new technologies and frameworks, identify technical improvements, and contribute to engineering standards and architectural decisions.
• Experience coaching, mentoring, and influencing junior engineers, peers, and cross-functional partners.
• Strong collaboration skills with experience working across roles, teams, and geographies.
• Customer-centric mindset, strong analytical and quantitative problem-solving skills, creativity, self-direction, and comfort thriving in small, high-impact project teams.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and business stakeholders.

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard's security policies and practices;
• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;
• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and
• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard's guidelines.