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 Who is Mastercard? Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry, building digital platforms that securely power commerce at global scale. Our technology enables innovation across financial services, data, AI, and digital experiences, while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, security, and trust. Business & Market Insights (B&MI) is Mastercard’s data, analytics, and intelligence organization, responsible for transforming vast, global data assets into actionable insights and decision support products for customers across industries. B&MI builds platforms and products that move beyond static analytics, embedding AI, advanced modeling, and increasingly agentic systems directly into customer workflows to help clients understand what is happening, what will happen next, and what actions to take. The team operates on a global scale, where product, engineering, and data teams come together to deliver secure, governed, and production ready intelligence solutions that drive measurable business outcomes.

Summary BET (Business Expansion & Transformation) is B&MI's innovation and growth organization responsible for sourcing, validating, incubating, and scaling new businesses, strategic bets, partnerships, and acquisitions that drive future revenue growth beyond the current portfolio. We are looking for an L5 Principal Engineer to serve as a dedicated technology leader embedded within the BET organization and an integral member of the BET Sourcing and Delivery team. Roles and Responsibilities • Serve as the senior technology and architecture advisor for new business opportunities, ensuring technical feasibility, capability needs, and architecture implications are considered early in the opportunity lifecycle. • Partner with product, business, sourcing, and engineering teams to shape opportunity hypotheses, solution concepts, business cases, and early feasibility assessments. o Evaluate new ideas, market signals, emerging technology trends, and opportunity spaces through a technology, architecture, and capability lens. o Support the design and evolution of agentic and AI-enabled opportunity identification capabilities, including taxonomies, prompt architectures, agent workflows, evaluation frameworks, and supporting intelligence systems where relevant to the role. • Assess whether opportunities are best pursued through build, partner, invest, acquire, or discontinue pathways, and provide clear technical recommendations to support decision-making. • Challenge assumptions and identify material technical risks early, before significant resources are committed to development or deployment. • Guide architecture, platform, and capability decisions during incubation, prototype, market test, commercialization, and scale phases. • Identify common capabilities, platforms, architectural patterns, and reusable assets that can accelerate value creation across multiple opportunities. o Define and maintain perspectives on relevant target-state architectures, including how future capabilities should be structured, integrated, governed, and scaled. o Help ensure solutions align with Mastercard technology standards, architecture expectations, operating requirements, security, reliability, and scale needs. o Mentor and influence engineers, architects, and product partners by contributing to shared engineering standards, architectural decisions, and technical