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

We are looking for a Lead AI Engineer to be part of The Mastercard Foundry R&D team. You will be part of the team that drives Mastercard's innovation journey by consistently looking to discover and learn new skills and technologies and apply them to create highly scalable products. The ideal candidate is passionate about technology, willing to experiment, agile, highly motivated, intellectually curious, analytical, and possesses an entrepreneurial mindset.

What you'll do

* Drive Generative AI Innovation: Lead the design and development of advanced AI solutions and proof-of-concepts focused on generative AI (e.g. LLMs, GANs). You will create prototypes, pilots, and MVPs that explore new use cases and demonstrate the art of the possible in payments and commerce. This includes pushing the frontier of applied AI through rapid experimentation and applied research.

* Technical Leadership: Provide hands-on technical leadership to a small, agile team of engineers. Guide the full software development lifecycle - from translating requirements into technical designs to coding, testing, and deployment. You'll establish high engineering standards (clean code, CI/CD, robust testing) and ensure production-ready quality for AI services. Mentor junior engineers and foster an innovation mindset within the team.

* Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams - including product owners, data scientists, researchers, and platform engineers - to identify AI opportunities and deliver solutions that meet business needs. You'll liaise with global teams in a fast-moving environment, ensuring alignment on project objectives and integrating generative AI features into existing products and processes.

* Model Deployment and Integration: You will oversee deploying these AI models into production environments and integrating them seamlessly with applications (in partnership with software and data engineers).

* R&D and Continuous Learning: Stay abreast of the latest developments in AI and especially generative AI. As part of Foundry R&D, you are expected to continuously explore emerging technologies (e.g. new model architectures, multimodal AI, agent-driven automation) and assess their potential impact on our products. You'll drive a culture of innovation by experimenting with advanced techniques (like retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge-grounded LLMs) and championing their adoption where they add value.

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.