Capital One is hiring an AI Engineer 4 on the Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team. This role focuses on benchmarking, evaluation, and explainability to support responsible, scalable AI systems used across the organization.

Role Overview

You will design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components that enable foundation model training and production use. The work includes large language model (LLM) inference, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, and model evaluation, along with experimentation, governance, and observability. The position also includes ownership of end-to-end architecture for complex AI systems with an emphasis on maintainability, monitoring, and ethical alignment.

Key Responsibilities

Partner with a cross-functional team of engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered capabilities that affect how associates work and how customers interact with Capital One.
Build and maintain AI software components, including foundation model training, LLM inference, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, and model evaluation, as well as related experimentation, governance, and observability.
Apply a broad stack of AI technologies, including Open Source and SaaS tools such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch, and others.
Develop and introduce state-of-the-art foundation model optimization techniques to improve performance drivers such as scalability, cost, latency, and throughput for large-scale production AI systems.
Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems at Capital One.
Own end-to-end architecture for complex AI systems, ensuring maintainability, observability, and ethical alignment.
Define and maintain service-level objectives (SLOs) for AI reliability, including latency, uptime, and model performance drift.
Collaborate with infrastructure engineering to optimize GPU/TPU utilization and accelerate model inference pipelines.
Lead cross-functional technical reviews for new AI system deployments, ensuring security, data governance, and compliance standards are met.
Mentor Principal and Senior Associates on scalable system design, performance tuning, and research-to-production translation.

Required Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field plus at least 4 years of experience developing AI/ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master’s degree plus 2 years of experience developing AI/ML algorithms or technologies.
At least 4 years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.

Technologies

Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, Java, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, C++, C#, Golang, GPU, TPU

Team Description

The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team is central to bringing Capital One’s AI vision to life. The team works with partners across the company to advance the state of the art in science and AI engineering, building and deploying proprietary solutions that support business value and deliver impact to millions of customers. AI models and platforms produced by the team help other teams enhance their products with responsible, scalable AI.

Ideal Candidate Profile

Enjoys building systems, values quality, and focuses on doing the right thing in engineering decisions.
Stays current with new research, can interpret scientific publications, and applies novel techniques thoughtfully in production settings.
Thrives in ambiguous, complex problem spaces, asks questions to uncover root causes, and communicates findings clearly and concisely.
Has strong technical depth across engineering and mathematics, with the ability to recognize and exploit optimization opportunities spanning hardware, software, and AI.
Demonstrates resilience and initiative when charting paths to achieve business goals without a predefined route.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience leading development of AI systems with tradeoff decisions across cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
6+ years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud.
Experience designing, developing, delivering, and supporting AI services.
Experience developing AI/ML algorithms or technologies (for example: LLM inference, similarity search and VectorDBs, guardrails, memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang.
Experience applying state-of-the-art training and inference optimization techniques to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
Experience building agentic AI systems and agentic workflows.
Proficiency in designing distributed systems for model training, evaluation, and online inference at petabyte scale.
Experience defining AI model governance processes, including producibility, lineage tracking, and automated retaining schedules.
Demonstrated ability to influence architectural decisions across multiple AI product lines or platforms.

Compensation and Location

Location: McLean, VA (onsite)

Base salary range: USD 197,300 - 225,100 per year

Pay range by location (annualized): Cambridge, MA: $197,300 - $225,100; McLean, VA: $197,300 - $225,100; New York, NY: $215,200 - $245,600; San Jose, CA: $215,200 - $245,600.

Benefits

Comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial, and other benefits supporting your total well-being.
Performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI).

Other Employer Notes

Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
This role is expected to accept applications for a minimum of 5 business days.
No agencies please. Capital One is an equal opportunity employer (EOE, including disability/vet) committed to non-discrimination in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
Capital One promotes a drug-free workplace.
Capital One will consider for employment qualified applicants with a criminal history in a manner consistent with applicable laws regarding criminal background inquiries.
If you need an accommodation related to applying, contact Capital One Recruiting at 1-800-304-9102 or [email protected].
For technical support or questions about Capital One’s recruiting process, email [email protected].
Capital One does not provide, endorse, or guarantee and is not liable for third-party products, services, educational tools, or other information available through this site.
Capital One Financial is made up of several different entities.

AI Engineer 4 (AI Foundations: Benchmarking, Evaluation, and Explainability)

Job Description