Senior Principal AI Infrastructure Architect

Mastercard; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard seeks a Senior Principal AI Engineer to lead AI infrastructure, shaping scalable, secure platforms for training and inference of LLMs and AI workloads. You will drive HPC, GPU, Kubernetes, and private/hybrid cloud initiatives across the enterprise, partnering with security, architecture, and product teams.

You will mentor engineers, set reliability standards, and ensure governance and auditability are built in from design through operations, in a highly regulated environment.

Qualifications

• Years of experience in AI engineering, high-performance computing, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, distributed systems, cloud technology, or related disciplines.
• Proven experience architecting and operating secure, mission-critical platforms at enterprise scale.
• Deep expertise in HPC, GPU/accelerated computing, rack-scale systems architecture, Kubernetes, private and hybrid cloud, high-speed networking, storage, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience supporting LLM training and inferencing, machine learning models, large language models, agentic AI, and production AI platforms.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, SRE, observability, resiliency, security, governance, compliance and production operations.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex architecture and engineering initiatives through technical expertise, influence and cross-functional collaboration.
• Strong communication and mentoring skills with the ability to engage senior stakeholders and elevate technical expertise across engineering teams.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Science, or a related discipline; advanced degree preferred.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical vision, architecture, and engineering standards for enterprise AI infrastructure and platforms.
• Lead the architecture and evolution of HPC, GPU and accelerated compute, rack-scale systems, private and hybrid cloud, Kubernetes, high-performance networking, storage, and AI platform services.
• Design infrastructure supporting LLM training and inferencing, model serving, machine learning workloads, agentic AI orchestration, and emerging AI capabilities.
• Solve complex infrastructure, performance, and scalability challenges through hands-on architecture, prototyping, performance engineering, and troubleshooting.
• Establish engineering patterns for reliability, resiliency, observability, automation, capacity management, security, and operational readiness.
• Embed security, privacy, Responsible AI, governance, compliance, and auditability into AI infrastructure by design.
• Evaluate emerging AI, HPC, GPU, networking, storage and infrastructure technologies and influence enterprise architecture and platform roadmaps.
• Lead complex cross-functional technical initiatives and mentor engineers through architecture reviews, engineering standards, reference designs and knowledge sharing.

Skills

HPC

GPU computing

Kubernetes

Distributed systems

Observability

Security

Mentoring

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelors in CS/Engineering

Advanced degree preferred

Tools

Linux

GPU clusters

Observability tooling

Security tooling

Job description

Mastercard seeks a Senior Principal AI Engineer to lead AI infrastructure, shaping scalable, secure platforms for training and inference of LLMs and AI workloads. You will drive HPC, GPU, Kubernetes, and private/hybrid cloud initiatives across the enterprise, partnering with security, architecture, and product teams.

You will mentor engineers, set reliability standards, and ensure governance and auditability are built in from design through operations, in a highly regulated environment.