Lead AI Engineer
Mastercard3 days ago
Base Salary
$140k - $277k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and build enterprise MCP components including security gateways, registries, and reference server implementations.
- Implement MCP identity, authentication, authorization, auditing, inspection, data-protection, rate-limiting, and kill-switch controls.
- Build, package, operate, and scale self-hosted open-weight model inference and enable switching across models and providers.
- Develop evaluation and testing tooling to benchmark model quality, cost, latency, and safety with reproducible results.
- Apply MLOps practices including infrastructure-as-code, observability, monitoring, and production operations.
- Partner with security, privacy, legal, identity, and AI governance stakeholders to implement enterprise requirements.
- Track developments in MCP, open-weight models, and agentic protocols and help determine what to adopt or prototype.
Requirements
- Strong knowledge of LLMs, foundation models, agents, and protocols such as MCP.
- Production software engineering experience building well-tested services.
- Solid MLOps experience with CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, containers, observability, and model and service monitoring.
- Good cloud platform knowledge, with AWS preferred and Azure or GCP valuable.
- Experience building model benchmarks and evaluations for quality, cost, latency, and safety.
- Hands-on experience serving, operating, self-hosting, and scaling open-weight models; fine-tuning or adapting models is advantageous.
- Working knowledge of API security, identity, authentication, and access control.
- Awareness of model provenance, licensing, data sovereignty, and financial-services regulation.
- Clear communication, collaboration, curiosity, learning agility, and ability to work independently.
Benefits
- Medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance.
- Flexible spending account and health savings account.
- 16 weeks of new parent leave, up to 20 days of bereavement leave, 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time, 25 vacation days, 5 personal days, and 10 U.S. observed holidays.
- 401(k) with company match and deferred compensation for eligible roles.
- Fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities.
- Tuition reimbursement eligibility.
- The posting lists locations in Purchase and New York, New York; Arlington, Virginia; and O’Fallon, Missouri, with the position intended to be filled by 02/07/2027.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Mastercard
Mastercard builds and operates a global payments network used by banks, merchants, fintechs, and governments, offering card processing, real-time payments, tokenization, and fraud/risk services. It generates revenue from transaction processing and assessment/service fees across more than 200 countries and territories. Founded in 1966 and headquartered in Purchase, New York, Mastercard is a public company listed on the NYSE (ticker: MA).