Software Engineer II - Backend/platform Agentic AI

Mastercard Mastercard · Fintech · Arlington, VA +1 · AI & Data

Software Engineer II - Backend/Platform Agentic AI role at Mastercard, focused on building and operating a first-party AI platform for analytics products. The role involves writing code daily, owning components end-to-end, and shipping production-grade AI-enabled services within a multi-tenant, customer-facing platform. Key responsibilities include implementing agentic workflows, integrating LLM-powered capabilities, and operating AI systems in production.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build and operate services delivering AI-powered features to customers, ensuring correctness, performance, and reliability in a multi-tenant distributed environment
  2. Implement agentic workflows and LLM integrations from design specifications, including tool calling, retrieval patterns, prompt management, and streaming responses
  3. Own delivery end-to-end: design, development, testing, deployment, documentation, and production support
  4. Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and release processes to ensure consistent, reliable delivery
  5. Monitor, debug, and improve AI systems—resolving production issues, optimizing latency, and maintaining service health

Skills

Required

  • Strong proficiency in Java for backend and service development
  • Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities in production (LLM APIs, model serving, retrieval pipelines, or similar)
  • Strong understanding of REST APIs, microservices architecture, and distributed systems fundamentals
  • Experience with CI/CD practices, including branching, build automation, quality gates, and deployment pipelines
  • Working knowledge of production operations: logging, metrics, monitoring, and incident response
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or Azure)

Nice to have

  • Python experience for AI/ML scripting, experimentation, or tooling
  • Familiarity with agentic AI frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain, or similar)
  • Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, or similar cloud data platforms
  • Experience with RAG patterns, vector databases, or semantic search
  • Exposure to prompt engineering and commercial LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI)
  • Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, or container orchestration
  • Familiarity with analytics platforms, data pipelines, or BI tools
  • Experience in financial services or other regulated environments

What the JD emphasized

  • Experience building and shipping AI-powered features in production environments
  • Strong Java engineering background
  • Hands-on experience in applied AI/ML (LLM integration, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, model serving, or inference services)
  • Familiar with production operations, including service ownership, incident response, and observability
  • Strong testing discipline
  • adherence to Mastercard standards for AI governance, Responsible AI, and data security in a regulated environment

Other signals

  • agentic workflows
  • LLM integrations
  • production-grade AI-enabled services
  • customer-facing platform