Principal 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

Principal AI Engineer

Overview

We are looking for a talented Principal AI Engineer to work with our Foundry Research and Development team to build innovative products delivered at scale to global markets.

Role
• Architects, designs, develops, and maintains advanced AI and Machine Learning systems to address specific business challenges.
• Oversees the deployment of models into production, ensuring scalability, reliability, and compliance with ethical guidelines.
• Develops and implements the contract or engagement between the Data Engineering team and the AI Engineering team to ensure that data ingestion, preprocessing, and feature engineering workflows support model training and inference.
• Develops and refines the technical strategy for AI/ML model optimization and deployment, ensuring alignment with business objectives and industry best practices.
• Undertakes research and prototyping efforts for deploying and managing scalable, maintainable AI/ML models, leveraging cutting-edge industry techniques.
• Supports high-impact AI/ML projects, providing technical mentorship and ensuring adherence to quality standards.
• Collaborates with product teams and stakeholders to translate business needs into effective AI/ML engineering solutions.
• Stays abreast of emerging AI/ML engineering trends and incorporates innovative techniques into Mastercard’s AI ecosystem.
• Mentors team members by sharing best practices, innovative techniques, and emerging trends to develop expertise and capabilities around their discipline.

All About You:
• Years of progressive leadership experience in AI and Data Science roles.
• Be energized by solving complex problems and delivering innovative solutions in collaborative, fast-paced environments.
• Possess deep expertise in modern software engineering principles, system design, and architectural best practices.
• Maintain a strong commitment to code quality, maintainability, and engineering excellence.
• Consistently demonstrate initiative and the ability to take on high-impact, ambiguous challenges.
• Exhibit exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Be highly motivated, driven, and a trusted team contributor and technical leader.
• Operate autonomously while mentoring and guiding other engineers, making sound technical decisions, and solving complex problems independently.

Skills
• Distinguished expertise in architecting and building Agentic AI systems using frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, and AutoGen, with deep command of Agentic AI design patterns, Context Management, LLMOps, AgentOps, Guardrails, Agent Validation, and Evaluation.
• Advanced mastery of prompt engineering and extensive experience working with both closed-source and open-source LLMs.
• Proven leadership in guiding teams through experimentation and strategic decision-making across RAG, few-shot prompting, LLM fine-tuning, and hybrid approaches to improve model context and reasoning.
• Strong command of MLOps practices and platforms, including MLflow.
• Demonstrated expertise in LLM fine-tuning techniques, including model quantization and distillation.
• Extensive hands-on experience implementing and optimizing multiple RAG paradigms, including graph-based RAG, vector database search, and performance tuning.
• Deep understanding of LLM cost structures, architectural trade-offs, and scalability considerations, with experience conducting ROI modeling and cost simulations.
• Extensive experience designing, implementing, and sustaining enterprise-grade CI/CD pipelines that enable automated integration, testing, and deployment with high reliability and speed.
• High proficiency in Python and the broader data science ecosystem, including NumPy, pandas, sklearn, spaCy, Keras, PyTorch, Transformers, and LangGraph.
• Strong practical experience applying Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and NLP models across supervised and unsupervised learning to solve complex, real-world business problems.
• Hands-on experience designing and developing Python-based APIs using frameworks such as FastAPI, with strong fluency in JSON-based integrations.
• Solid experience working with PySpark and a strong conceptual grasp of distributed and parallel processing for large-scale data workloads.
• Extensive experience using Unix/Linux environments to access systems, interact with databases, and deploy, operate, and manage services and APIs.
• Experience designing and deploying solutions on cloud platforms such as Azure, leveraging cloud-native services at scale.
• Familiarity with Databricks platforms is a plus.

#AI1

Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact [email protected] and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.

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.

In line with Mastercard’s total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in Canada, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive pay based on location, experience and other qualifications for the role and may be eligible to participate in a discretionary annual incentive program. This posting reflects one or more current openings on our team.

Pay Ranges

Toronto, Canada: $138,000 - $221,000 CAD