Lead AI Engineer

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.

Title and Summary

Lead AI Engineer

Overview
As a Lead AI Engineer within the AI foundations team, you are a subject matter expert in AI Engineering who applies advanced technical knowledge to drive the achievement of strategic goals and initiatives. You influence technical direction, shape scalable AI solutions, and contribute to the continuous improvement of products, services, and engineering processes. This role operates as a senior individual contributor with clear technical leadership expectations, including mentoring others and raising engineering standards across the team.

Responsibilities
• Be the subject matter expert in AI Engineering, influencing stakeholders and applying advanced expertise to deliver key initiatives and outcomes.
• Design, develop, and maintain advanced AI and machine learning systems that address complex and high‑impact business challenges.
• Implement AI/ML models into production environments, designing and maintaining scalable training pipelines and robust deployment frameworks.
• Build, optimize, and evolve data ingestion, preprocessing, and feature engineering workflows to support reliable model training and inference at scale.
• Automate end‑to‑end workflows for model training, testing, deployment, and updates using CI/CD and MLOps best practices.
• Monitor model performance in production, manage model and data versioning, and lead model updates or enhancements to sustain high‑quality outputs over time.
• Ensure the operational stability, scalability, and resilience of AI systems, while adhering to ethical AI principles and contributing to shared AI platforms and infrastructure.
• Guide and mentor junior engineers through hands‑on collaboration, design and code reviews, and technical coaching, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and engineering excellence.
• Contribute to solution development for new products or services and lead smaller initiatives or workstreams within larger AI programs.

Experience Requirements

• 7+ years of professional experience in AI Engineering, Machine Learning Engineering, or related software engineering roles, with sustained ownership of production AI/ML systems.
• Proven track record designing, developing, and maintaining end‑to‑end AI/ML solutions, from data ingestion and feature engineering through deployment and ongoing lifecycle management.
• Hands‑on experience implementing AI/ML models into production environments, including scalable training pipelines, deployment frameworks, and operational monitoring.
• Strong experience applying MLOps practices, including CI/CD automation, model and data versioning, performance monitoring, and retraining workflows.
• Experience building and maintaining reliable data preprocessing and feature engineering pipelines to support model training and inference at scale.
• Demonstrated technical leadership as a senior individual contributor, including mentoring junior engineers, leading technical workstreams, and influencing design and implementation decisions.
• Proven ability to collaborate effectively with cross‑functional partners and translate complex business problems into scalable AI engineering solutions.

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.