Senior Principal AI Engineer- AI Center of Excellence

Mastercard is building secure, scalable, production-grade enterprise AI through its AI Center of Excellence, and this individual-contributor role helps set the technical direction for AI infrastructure. If you thrive in a highly regulated environment and want to work hands-on across LLM training and inferencing, model serving, agentic AI, and emerging capabilities, you will help define architecture standards and deliver engineering patterns that support reliable, observable operations at enterprise scale.

Location: New York, NY (onsite)

Compensation: USD 212,000 - 407,000 per year

What you’ll do

• Define the technical vision, architecture, and engineering standards for enterprise AI infrastructure and platforms.
• Lead the architecture and evolution of HPC, GPU, accelerated compute, rack-scale systems, and private and hybrid cloud environments.
• Own platform capabilities across Kubernetes, high-performance networking, storage, and AI platform services.
• Design infrastructure for LLM training and inferencing, model serving, machine learning workloads, and agentic AI orchestration.
• Solve complex infrastructure, performance, and scalability problems through hands-on architecture, prototyping, performance engineering, and troubleshooting.
• Establish engineering patterns for reliability, resiliency, observability, automation, capacity management, security, and operational readiness.
• Embed security, privacy, Responsible AI, governance, compliance, and auditability into AI infrastructure by design.
• Evaluate emerging AI, HPC, GPU, networking, and storage technologies and influence enterprise architecture and platform roadmaps.
• Lead complex cross-functional technical initiatives and mentor engineers through architecture reviews, engineering standards, reference designs, and knowledge sharing.

What you bring

• Experience in AI engineering, high-performance computing, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, distributed systems, cloud technology, or related disciplines.
• Proven ability to architect and operate secure, mission-critical platforms at enterprise scale.
• Deep expertise in HPC, GPU/accelerated computing, rack-scale systems architecture, Kubernetes, private and hybrid cloud, high-speed networking, storage, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience supporting LLM training and inferencing, model serving, machine learning workloads including large language models, and agentic AI production platforms.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems and production operations, including SRE, observability, resiliency, security, governance, and compliance.
• Ability to lead complex architecture and engineering initiatives through technical expertise and cross-functional collaboration.
• Strong communication and mentoring skills, including engaging senior stakeholders and elevating technical expertise across teams.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Science, or related discipline; advanced degree preferred.

Technologies you’ll work with

HPC, GPU, accelerated computing, rack-scale systems architecture, Kubernetes, private and hybrid cloud, high-performance networking, storage, LLM training, LLM inferencing, model serving, agentic AI

Benefits

• Insurance including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance
• Flexible spending account and health savings account
• Paid leaves including 16 weeks of new parent leave and up to 20 days of bereavement leave
• Paid Sick and Safe Time (80 hours)
• 25 days of vacation time and 5 personal days (pro-rated based on date of hire)
• 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays
• 401k with a best-in-class company match
• Deferred compensation for eligible roles
• Fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities
• Eligibility for tuition reimbursement
• Additional intern benefits include paid sick and safe time, jury duty leave, and on-site fitness facilities in some locations

Corporate security responsibility

• 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
• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines

Posting window: Posting windows may change based on application volume and business necessity. Candidates are encouraged to apply expeditiously.