Director, AI engineering

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
Director, AI engineering
Who is Mastercard?
Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realise their greatest potential.
Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.
Overview
The CNPF Data & AI organisation is looking for a Director of Applied AI (L5) to lead strategy, execution, and delivery of applied AI capabilities across Small & Medium Enterprise (SME), Corporate Solution, Transfer Solution and Commercial Verticals.
This role is a senior technical leadership position within AI Product Enablement, responsible for building and scaling AI solutions that move into production, shape product direction, and deliver measurable business impact. The Director will lead senior individual contributors and managers, partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Business leaders, and ensure AI initiatives are aligned with Mastercard's governance, security, and delivery standards.
Role• Own and drive the applied AI strategy for CNPF data products, including prioritisation, technical direction, and delivery outcomes• Lead and mentor senior applied AI data scientists and engineers, setting high standards for technical excellence and execution• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to translate business problems into scalable AI solutions• Oversee the design, development, validation, and production deployment of ML and GenAI models• Ensure AI solutions meet Mastercard standards for governance, explainability, performance, and risk management• Influence architecture and platform decisions to enable reusable, production-grade AI capabilities• Communicate progress, risks, and impact clearly to senior and executive stakeholders• Contribute to talent strategy, hiring, and long-term capability building for Applied AI
ALL ABOUT YOU• Significant experience leading applied AI or machine learning teams in production environments• Deep expertise in applied machine learning, advanced analytics, and modern AI techniques including GenAI• Proven ability to drive AI initiatives from concept through to secure, scalable production deployment• Experience working with large-scale data and distributed data platforms• Strong understanding of model evaluation, validation metrics, and business trade-offs• Excellent stakeholder management and cross-functional leadership skills• Demonstrated people leadership, including mentoring senior ICs and managers• Strong communication skills, able to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences
What Makes You Stand Out• You have personally built or led agentic AI applications that run in production, not just prototypes• Direct experience designing multi-agent systems with planning, reasoning, and tool-use capabilities• Hands-on delivery of LLM-powered agents with guardrails, observability, and failure handling• Practical experience with agent orchestration patterns including state management, long-running workflows, and human-in-the-loop controls• Strong understanding of balancing autonomy and risk through evaluation, governance, and runtime controls• Experience partnering with security, platform, and governance teams to ship agentic AI responsibly at scale
Corporate Security Responsibility
Every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security. All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks come with inherent risk and therefore it is expected that the successful candidate will:• 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 mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard's guidelines
Corporate Security Responsibility
All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• 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.