Lead AI Engineer (GenAI Platform, AI Foundations, LLM Core and Agentic AI)

Capital One seeks a Lead AI Engineer onsite in Richmond, Virginia to shape GenAI Platform, AI Foundations, LLM Core and Agentic AI. This role offers a competitive annual salary in the range of USD 179,400 to 204,700 and requires a Master’s degree with at least 2 years of relevant AI/ML experience (or a Bachelor’s with at least 4 years). You will design, develop, test, and deploy AI software components and contribute to the long term technical vision for foundational AI systems. You will collaborate with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI powered products that transform how Capital One associates work and how customers interact with Capital One.

Benefits

• Health benefits
• Performance-based incentive compensation (cash bonuses and long-term incentives)

Responsibilities

• Partner with a cross functional team of engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI powered products that transform how Capital One associates work and how customers interact with Capital One.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components including foundation model training, large language model inference, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Leverage a broad stack of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, Nemo Guardrails, PyTorch, and more.
• Invent and introduce state of the art LLM optimization techniques to improve the performance of large scale production AI systems in terms of scalability, cost, latency, and throughput.
• Contribute to the technical vision and long term roadmap of foundational AI systems at Capital One.

Technologies

• AWS Ultraclusters
• Huggingface
• VectorDBs
• Nemo Guardrails
• PyTorch
• Python
• Go
• Scala
• Java

Requirements

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

The Ideal Candidate

• You enjoy building systems, take pride in code quality, and are motivated to work on problems that advance banking for good.
• You stay current with AI research and can translate publications into production ready techniques.
• You adapt quickly, bring clarity to large, undefined problems, ask questions, and articulate findings concisely; you share new ideas, even when unproven.
• You are deeply technical, with a strong foundation in engineering and mathematics, and you leverage hardware, software, and AI insights to find optimization opportunities others miss.
• You are a resilient trailblazer who can forge new paths to achieve business goals when the route is unclear.

Preferred Qualifications

• 6 years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud).
• Experience designing, developing, delivering, and supporting AI services.
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies (LLM inference, similarity search and vector databases, guardrails, memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, or Golang.
• Experience developing and applying state of the art techniques to optimize training and inference software for better hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• A sustained interest in AI research and systems, with a track record of judiciously applying novel techniques in production.