Senior Principal AI Engineer- AI Center of Excellence

Mastercard’s AI Center of Excellence is seeking a Senior Principal AI Engineer, an individual-contributor role focused on building secure, scalable, production-grade enterprise AI infrastructure. This onsite position in New York, NY applies deep expertise in HPC, GPU and accelerated systems, Kubernetes, and private or hybrid cloud to support LLM training and inferencing, model serving, agentic AI orchestration, and emerging AI capabilities in a highly regulated environment.

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 and GPU/accelerated compute, rack-scale systems, private and hybrid cloud, Kubernetes, high-performance networking, storage, and AI platform services.
• Design infrastructure for LLM training and inferencing, model serving, machine learning workloads, agentic AI orchestration, and emerging AI capabilities.
• Address complex infrastructure, performance, and scalability challenges 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, storage, and infrastructure 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.

Minimum qualifications

• Experience in AI engineering, high-performance computing, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, distributed systems, cloud technology, or a related discipline.
• Proven experience architecting and operating 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 models, large language models, agentic AI, and production AI platforms.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, SRE, observability, resiliency, security, governance, compliance, and production operations.
• Ability to lead complex architecture and engineering initiatives using technical expertise, influence, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Strong communication and mentoring skills, including the ability to engage senior stakeholders and raise technical expertise across teams.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Science, or a 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 and 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
• 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

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 the volume of applications received and business necessity. Candidates are encouraged to apply expeditiously.