Senior Lead AI Engineer

What Capital One offers

• Performance-based incentive compensation with cash bonuses and potential long-term incentives
• Comprehensive health benefits
• Financial benefits and programs to support total well-being
• Collaborative, innovation-driven culture on the Intelligent Foundations and Experiences team delivering AI at scale

Location: McLean, Virginia (onsite)

Salary: USD 229,900 - 262,400 per year

Capital One is building responsible and reliable AI systems to transform banking for good. The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team sits at the core of our AI efforts, partnering across the business to push forward AI engineering and deploy proprietary solutions that deliver value to millions of customers.

Team and role overview

The IFX team brings together engineers, researchers, program managers, and product managers to advance state-of-the-art AI and deliver foundational AI capabilities that support scalable products and platforms across Capital One.

The ideal candidate

You enjoy building robust systems and take pride in the quality of your work. You stay current with AI research and can translate novel techniques into production-ready solutions. You adapt quickly to ill-defined problems, ask thoughtful questions, and communicate findings clearly. You bring deep technical competence across hardware, software, and AI, and you are willing to forge new paths to achieve business goals. You are motivated to contribute to banking that is more responsible and customer-focused.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with a cross-functional team of engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products that change how 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 apply state-of-the-art LLM optimization techniques to improve scalability, cost, latency, and throughput in production AI systems
• Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap of foundational AI systems at Capital One

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field plus at least 6 years of AI/ML experience, or a Master's degree in the same fields plus at least 4 years of AI/ML experience
• At least 6 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, or Java

Technologies

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

Preferred qualifications

• 7 years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud)
• Experience designing, developing, integrating, delivering, and supporting complex AI systems
• Demonstrated ability to lead and mentor an engineering team and influence cross-functional stakeholders
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies (e.g. LLM Inference, Similarity Search and VectorDBs, Guardrails, Memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, or Golang
• Experience optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost
• Strong interest in AI research and systems, with ability to judiciously apply novel techniques in production
• Excellent communication and presentation skills to articulate complex AI concepts to peers