Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)

Overview

Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (AI) for the Operational Intelligence Program within Mastercard's Business & Market Insights group. The role embeds with clients before production code is written to validate AI solutions, build scoped proof-of-concept prototypes, and provide evidence-backed briefs to product and engineering teams.

What you'll do

• Embed directly with issuer and acquirer clients to understand operational workflows, surface pain points, and identify where AI-driven automation or intelligence creates measurable business value.
• Design and build rapid proof-of-concept prototypes, including agentic pipelines, conversational interfaces, and analytical tools, scoped to test specific business hypotheses rather than be production-ready.
• Translate ambiguous client requirements into concrete, testable problem statements and push back on requirements that are too broad to validate or too narrow to generalize.
• Run structured validation sessions with customers using working prototypes, gather qualitative and quantitative signals, and document what the proof of concept does not address.
• Synthesize field observations into product briefs covering scoped requirements, edge cases, platform constraints, and a clear go/no-go recommendation.
• Partner with product managers to ensure proof-of-concept findings inform roadmap decisions and backlog items.
• Maintain working knowledge of LLMs, agentic frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation, and structured data reasoning to assess what is feasible in a six-week proof of concept versus what requires a platform build.
• Identify patterns across client engagements that suggest platform-level investment and repeatable product features.
• Represent technical feasibility in pre-sales and discovery conversations and provide customers and internal stakeholders with an honest assessment of what AI can and cannot do for their workflow.
• Mentor engineers and analysts on customer discovery, proof-of-concept scoping, and presenting findings without overselling.
• Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices.
• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of accessed information.
• Report suspected information security violations or breaches.
• Complete periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.

What you'll need

• Master's or bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, with significant experience delivering AI or data solutions to enterprise clients.
• Proven track record building working AI prototypes that directly influenced product or investment decisions.
• Strong engineering foundation and ability to write clean, working code quickly without over-engineering for irrelevant production concerns at the proof-of-concept stage.
• Fluency in Python.
• Comfort with SQL.
• Hands-on experience with LLM APIs and agentic patterns.
• Exceptional customer-facing communication, including running discovery sessions with non-technical reconciliation analysts and writing technical scoping documents.
• Strong product instinct to distinguish business requirements from solution assumptions and symptoms from root causes.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and scoping unclear problem statements as part of the job.
• Experience working in regulated industries such as financial services, payments, or healthcare, where data sensitivity, compliance constraints, and customer trust shape what can and cannot be prototyped.
• Track record of handing off well-scoped, evidence-backed briefs to product and engineering teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with large-scale structured data and cloud data platforms.

Details

• Location: Pune, India.