Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)
Mastercard1 day ago
Pune, IndiaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Embed with issuer and acquirer clients to understand workflows, identify pain points, and find opportunities for AI-driven automation or intelligence.
- Build rapid proof-of-concept agentic pipelines, conversational interfaces, and analytical tools to test focused business hypotheses.
- Translate ambiguous client requirements into concrete, testable problem statements and appropriately scoped prototypes.
- Run structured customer validation sessions and collect qualitative and quantitative evidence about prototype effectiveness.
- Create product briefs covering requirements, edge cases, platform constraints, and go/no-go recommendations.
- Partner with product managers to translate validated findings into roadmap decisions and backlog items.
- Identify recurring needs across engagements that warrant platform-level product investment.
- Represent technical feasibility in pre-sales and discovery conversations.
- Mentor engineers and analysts on customer discovery, prototype scoping, and presenting findings accurately.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- Significant experience delivering AI or data solutions to enterprise clients.
- Proven track record of building AI prototypes that influenced product or investment decisions.
- Strong engineering foundation and ability to write clean working code quickly.
- Fluency in Python and comfort with SQL.
- Hands-on experience with LLM APIs and agentic patterns, including understanding when prompting, engineering, or fine-tuning is appropriate.
- Exceptional customer-facing communication and technical scoping skills.
- Strong product judgment and ability to distinguish business requirements from solution assumptions.
- Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous problem spaces.
- Experience working in regulated industries such as financial services, payments, or healthcare.
- Track record of handing off well-scoped, evidence-backed briefs to product and engineering teams.
- Experience with large-scale structured data and cloud data platforms is preferred.
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).