Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)
Salary not listed • Pune, India • Full-time
Posted 23d ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
Full-time
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
Mastercard's Business & Market Insights (B&MI) group is seeking a Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (AI) to join their Operational Intelligence Program. This role bridges the gap between clients and product development, focusing on validating AI solutions against business problems before production code is written. You will embed with clients to understand their workflows, identify opportunities for AI-driven value, and deliver clear, evidence-backed briefs to product and engineering teams. Your primary deliverable is clarity and validated insights, not production code, ensuring that investments are made in solutions that demonstrably solve business needs.
Responsibilities
- Embed with clients to understand operational workflows and identify AI-driven business value.
- Design and build rapid proof-of-concept AI prototypes (e.g., agentic pipelines, conversational interfaces) to test specific business hypotheses.
- Translate ambiguous client requirements into concrete, testable problem statements.
- Conduct validation sessions with customers using prototypes to gather feedback on effectiveness.
- Synthesize field observations into product briefs, including scoped requirements, edge cases, and go/no-go recommendations.
- Partner with product managers to ensure PoC findings inform roadmap decisions.
- Maintain knowledge of the AI capability landscape (LLMs, agentic frameworks, RAG, structured data reasoning) to assess feasibility.
- Identify patterns across client engagements that suggest platform-level investment.
- Represent technical feasibility in pre-sales and discovery conversations.
- Mentor engineers and analysts on customer discovery techniques and PoC scoping.
Requirements
- Master's or bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, with significant experience delivering AI or data solutions to enterprise clients.
- Proven track record of building AI prototypes that influenced product or investment decisions.
- Strong engineering foundation with the ability to write clean, working code quickly for PoCs.
- Fluent in Python and comfortable with SQL.
- Experience with large-scale structured data and cloud data platforms is a strong plus.
- Hands-on experience with LLM APIs and agentic patterns.
- Exceptional customer-facing communication skills.
- Strong product instinct to distinguish business requirements from solution assumptions.
- Comfort operating in ambiguity and scoping unclear problem statements.
- Experience working in regulated industries (e.g., financial services, payments, healthcare) is beneficial.
- Track record of handing off well-scoped, evidence-backed briefs to product and engineering teams.