Senior Data Scientist (AI, ML, Pyspark, SQL)

Mastercard is hiring a Senior Data Scientist (AI, ML, Pyspark, SQL) in Pune, India. Level rates it ; you can apply on Mastercard.

Level's read on this job

Works on AI ●●●○ is how Level rates this data scientist role: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
The posting mentions AI safety among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as a senior role.
Mastercard has 1,100+ other open roles on Level.
Posted in the last few days.

AI in this role

ai-safety

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

Senior Data Scientist (AI, ML, Pyspark, SQL)

Overview
The Business & Market Insights (B&MI) team within Mastercard's Services division creates products that help customers including financial institutions and merchants understand their customers and the market better. The B&MI Data Science team uses data from Mastercard transactions and other sources to build models and solutions that are needed for these products, at a globally scalable level across the different customer lifecycle stages.

This role is for a Data Scientist that will work across Product, Client Services & Delivery, Data & Engineering and the broader teams, to deliver truly differentiated products driven by analytics & AI, leveraging rich data resources, AI platform capabilities and near real-time execution.

We are developing multiple new products and capabilities using analytics & AI, and this role is central in that vision, from concept, technical design to market release and optimization. This role is positioned to drive new ideas forward by combining creative thought leadership with innovation and industry best practices. By entering in the early phase of a truly transformative and impactful strategic initiative, the experience is certain to be rewarding.

This role requires the successful candidate to have the following:

- 5-9 years of overall career experience in Data Science function supporting Products
- Design, develop, and productionize machine learning and data science solutions that solve complex business problems within BMI.
- Develop traditional ML solutions covering feature engineering, model training, validation, evaluation, and deployment.
- Perform exploratory data analysis and translate complex datasets into actionable insights.
- Optimize data pipelines and ML workflows for performance, scalability, maintainability, and reliability.
- Develop robust and reusable Python components following sound software-engineering practices.
- Use PySpark to process, transform, and analyze large datasets efficiently in distributed environments.
- Write advanced, optimized SQL for data extraction, transformation, feature development, and analytical workloads.
- Apply appropriate controls for data privacy, security, responsible AI, monitoring, and explainability.

Good to have:
- Understanding of building Generative AI applications using Python and modern GenAI frameworks.

The successful candidate’s primary responsibilities will be to:
- Drive the evolution of Business & Market Insights products by applying Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to create models, tools and capabilities
- Participate in the exploration, application and development of data science for product development
- Participate in identification and evaluation of AI/ML techniques and tools to deliver models and analytics for product development
- Continuously innovate and determine new data science approaches & technologies to solve business problems and generate business insights & recommendations
- Partner with roles across the organization including product, engineering, and sales to determine the highest priority data science problems to solve in a customer-centric framework
- Evaluate trade-offs between many possible analytics solutions to a problem, taking into account performance, usability, technical feasibility, timelines, and differing stakeholder opinions to make a decision
- Break large solutions into smaller, releasable milestones to collect data and feedback from product managers, clients and other stakeholders
- Evangelize releases to users, incorporating feedback, and tracking usage to inform future development
- Work with small, cross-functional teams to define vision, establish team culture and processes
- Consistently focus on key drivers of organization value and prioritize operational activities accordingly
- Identify and act upon product improvement opportunities
- Provide technical leadership of junior colleagues as a senior member of the data science team, through technical and non-technical mentoring

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.

How we rate this

Senior Data Scientist (AI, ML, Pyspark, SQL) at Mastercard rates 63 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Senior Data Scientist (AI, ML, Pyspark, SQL) is an open job at Mastercard.
Level rates this role AI Level 3 of 4: Works on AI.
The role is based in Pune, India.
The job was posted on October 29, 2026.
Seniority: senior.
Applications are handled by Mastercard. Apply on Mastercard

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI Safety

Also common in data scientist jobs at this level

LLM dbt Snowflake AI agents AWS Databricks

Pay

Typical data scientist job: $166k

This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical data scientist figure when pay comes up. See data scientist jobs

Questions you could be asked

How do you think about the risk of an AI system in this kind of role failing silently?
Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
If you removed AI from this role, what would be left, and how do you decide what still needs a human?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: AI Safety. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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