Director, AI Engineering, Transformation Team

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.

About the role

The Transformation Team leads strategic change initiatives to reimagine how Mastercard works and scales, simplifies, and accelerates business outcomes. The team partners across leadership, product, technology, and operations to design and implement new organizational models, embed AI across key workflows, drive enterprise-wide transformation programs, improve operating effectiveness, and ensure successful adoption of change. By combining strategy, AI engineering, organizational design, change management, and program execution, the team helps align people, processes, and priorities to support long-term growth and business performance.

Responsibilities

• Develops and executes short-term and medium-term strategic plans for AI Engineering across Mastercard, aligning functional initiatives with organizational objectives by modifying existing methods to make significant improvements to existing processes, programs, and/or policies.
• Drives the development and execution of short-term functional strategies for AI/ML teams, translating organizational priorities into actionable plans and deliverables.
• Collaborates with product and business leaders to translate organizational needs into scalable AI solutions and operational strategies.
• Oversees the ML engineering lifecycle of AI/ML projects, from architecture, design to deployment and monitoring, ensuring timely delivery within scope and budget.
• Leads cross-functional teams in optimizing, fine-tuning, and deploying models that meet performance, robustness, and ethical standards, ensuring operational stability, scalability, and compliance of AI/ML systems, including model governance, ethical standards, and risk management.
• Provides technical guidance and mentorship to senior technical leads, supporting their professional growth and ensuring technical excellence.
• Serves as a key stakeholder and influencer in cross-functional initiatives, working closely with product managers, data scientists, and business units to align AI/ML solutions with strategic objectives.
• Defines and refines best practices, standards, and methodologies for AI/ML optimization, deployment, and maintenance, ensuring consistency and high-quality outputs.
• Contributes to organizational strategy by identifying emerging trends, evaluating new technologies, and recommending investments in AI/ML capabilities.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on understanding of transformer architectures and generative AI, including fine-t