AI Engineer at Mastercard in St. Louis, MO

AI Engineer Location: Remote - St. Louis 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 AI Engineer Mastercard's Business & Market Insights (B&MI) group empowers organizations to achieve growth and innovation goals by delivering unparalleled data-driven intelligence and cutting-edge AI solutions. By harnessing proprietary data, frontier generative AI, and global expertise, B&MI helps businesses make smarter, faster, and more impactful decisions. We transform complex, multi-modal data into agentic systems and generative applications that drive measurable business outcomes and sustained competitive advantage. We are looking for a Lead Engineer, Generative AI & ML Engineering for the Operational Intelligence Program within B&MI. This role will lead a team of Gen AI engineers to architect and deliver next-generation LLM, agentic, and multimodal AI systems that enable business growth, elevate customer experience, and ensure secure, scalable, production-grade AI. As a technical leader, you will set the engineering standard for Gen AI development — driving innovation across agentic orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, LLMOps, and responsible AI — while fostering a culture of continuous learning and engineering excellence. Roles & Responsibilities • Architect and lead the development of multi-agent AI systems using frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, and AutoGen — enabling autonomous reasoning, tool use, inter-agent coordination, and adaptive decision-making at enterprise scale. • Design and operationalize multimodal generative AI pipelines that unify text, image, tabular, and graph data using transformer-based architectures (BERT, CLIP, LLaVA, T5, Whisper, GPT-4o, Gemini) for rich, cross-modal intelligence. • Build production-grade RAG and Graph-RAG systems integrating vector databases (Pinecone, pgvector, OpenSearch) and knowledge graphs (Neo4j, AWS Neptune) for semantic retrieval, entity-aware reasoning, and grounded generation. • Lead LLM fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and model alignment strategies — including RLHF, PEFT, LoRA, and instruction tuning — to adapt foundation models for specialized enterprise use cases. • Establish robust LLMOps and MLOps pipelines on Databricks (AWS) using MLflow, feature stores, prompt evaluation frameworks, model lineage tracking, and continuous retraining workflows to ensure reliable AI delivery. • Develop high-performance Python backend services for LLM inference orchestration, async job handling, streaming responses, and distributed data workflows supporting high-throughput Gen AI operations. • Engineer state, memory, and context management subsystems that enable agents to reason temporally, maintain session continuity, manage long-context windows, and coordinate across tools and modalities. • Implement Responsible AI and AI governance practices — including bias detection, hallucination mitigation, explainability dashboards, output safety guardrails, and compliance with data ethics standards — ensuring transparency and fairness of deployed models. • Apply traditional ML and statistical modeling (regression, clustering, forecasting, ensemble methods) in hybrid architectures alongside LLMs for interpretable, explainability-first decision systems. • Continuously research, evaluate, and productionize advancements in generative modeling, agentic AI, multimodal transformers, and frontier foundation models — benchmarking against enterprise-scale performance and safety requirements. All About You • Master's or Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI/ML, or Engineering, with significant hands-on experience leading and delivering complex Gen AI or ML engineering programs in production environments. • Expert-level, hands-on experience designing, building, and deploying large language model (LLM) applications, agentic systems, and RAG pipelines — from prototype to production. • Deep proficiency with LLM ecosystems: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Hugging Face, LangChain/LangGraph, and open-source foundation models (LLaMA, Mistral, Falcon, etc.). • Strong command of Gen AI engineering patterns: prompt engineering, chain-of-thought reasoning, tool/function calling, vector embeddings, semantic search, and agent memory architectures. • Solid applied knowledge of ML fundamentals — predictive modeling, deep learning (PyTorch, TensorFlow), and statistical techniques — used in tandem with Gen AI for hybrid, interpretable systems. • Excellent Python engineering skills including async programming, API development (FastAPI), and building inference-ready microservices; SQL proficiency required. • Hands-on experience with cloud AI infrastructure (AWS SageMaker, Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, or GCP Vertex AI) and familiarity with MLOps/LLMOps tooling (MLflow, Weights & Biases, etc.). Strong analytical, communication, and stakeholder management skills — with the ability to translate complex Gen AI concepts into business value and lead cross-functional teams toward delivery. 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 reasonable_accommodation@mastercard.com 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 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 the US, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive base salary and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. The base salary offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including but not limited to location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Mastercard benefits for full time (and certain part time) employees generally include: insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, 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); 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time, 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; and many more. Mastercard benefits for interns generally include: 56 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time; jury duty leave; and on-site fitness facilities in some locations. Pay Ranges Remote - St. Louis: $140,000 - $231,000 USD Job Posting Window Posting windows may change based on the volume of applications received and business necessity. Candidates are encouraged to apply expeditiously.