Director of AI Engineering

About Mastercard

Mastercard operates worldwide, supporting economies and empowering people across 200+ countries and territories. The company facilitates a broad spectrum of digital payment options, ensuring transactions are secure, simple, intelligent, and accessible. Through advanced technology, innovation, strategic partnerships, and networks, Mastercard delivers innovative products and services enabling people, businesses, and governments to achieve their greatest potential.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Director of AI Engineering to lead a specialised group of AI engineers focused on the development of foundation models and the successful execution of impactful AI use cases. This leadership role is centered on the practical application of transformer-based and generative AI technologies, ensuring models are expertly developed, adapted, and deployed to resolve significant business challenges.

Responsibilities

• Manage and lead an AI engineering team concentrated on foundation model creation, fine-tuning, and optimisation, with an emphasis on transformer and generative AI technologies.
• Oversee the end-to-end delivery process of AI initiatives, from defining the problem to integrating models and deploying them in production environments.
• Collaborate with product and business teams to identify and prioritize AI use cases with substantial impact, translating these into actionable technical plans.
• Ensure the effective application of foundational AI models through strategies involving prompting techniques, embeddings, fine-tuning, evaluation, and performance improvements.
• Work closely with data engineering and platform teams to guarantee the readiness of data, smooth model integration, and scalable deployment methodologies.
• Introduce and uphold best practices for model validation, experimentation, and continuous enhancement, securing reliable and measurable AI solutions.
• Implement responsible AI principles, including bias assessment, model validation, and protective guardrails.
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to engineering teams, maintaining rigorous standards in AI development and software engineering.
• Monitor project progress, manage risks, and ensure timely and high-quality delivery aligned with program objectives.

Candidate Profile

• Extensive leadership experience guiding teams delivering AI and ML solutions in production, especially in environments focused on specific use cases.
• Strong hands-on expertise with transformer architectures and generative AI methods such as fine-tuning, prompting, embeddings, and evaluation techniques.
• Proven ability to connect model development efforts with practical, real-world business applications.
• Robust software engineering skills, including proficiency with Python, ML frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow, and understanding of production deployment strategies.
• Experience collaborating with data engineering and MLOps teams to enable training, model evaluation, and inference at scale.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills, capable of aligning technical delivery to business goals with measurable results.
• Demonstrated success leading high-performing teams, offering technical direction, mentoring, and overseeing project delivery.
• Comfort in navigating fast-evolving AI fields marked by ambiguity and shifting priorities.
• Outstanding communication skills, adept at explaining complex AI concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Corporate Security Responsibilities

• Adhere to Mastercard’s security policies and procedures.
• Maintain confidentiality and integrity of accessed information.
• Report any suspected breaches or security violations promptly.
• Complete all mandatory security training sessions as required by Mastercard.