Senior Lead AI Engineer (AI Foundations, LLM Core and Agentic AI)

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with a cross functional team of engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI powered products that transform how associates work and how customers interact with Capital One.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components including foundation model training, LLM 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, Hugging Face, VectorDBs, Nemo Guardrails, PyTorch, and more.
• Invent and apply state of the art LLM optimization techniques to boost performance metrics including scalability, cost, latency, and throughput in large scale production AI systems.
• Contribute to the technical vision and the long term roadmap of foundational AI systems at Capital One.

Requirements

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

Technologies

• AWS Ultraclusters
• Hugging Face
• VectorDBs
• Nemo Guardrails
• PyTorch
• Python
• Go
• Scala
• Java

Benefits

• Health benefits
• Performance based incentive compensation
• Long term incentives (LTI)

Overview

Capital One is committed to building responsible and reliable AI systems that help change banking for good. The company has a history of leading in machine learning to deliver real time, personalized customer experiences. Investments in technology infrastructure and world class talent position Capital One at the forefront of enterprise AI, with initiatives spanning customer interactions and advisory capabilities.

Team Description

The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team sits at the heart of Capital One's AI efforts. We partner across the company to advance scientific and engineering work, building and deploying proprietary solutions that matter to the business and to millions of customers. Our models and platforms empower teams to enhance products with AI.

The ideal candidate

• You enjoy building systems, take pride in code quality, and are committed to doing the right thing to improve banking for good.
• You stay current with the latest research and can translate publications into production ready solutions.
• You adapt quickly, bring clarity to undefined problems, ask questions, dive deep, and communicate findings clearly. You share new ideas even when unproven.
• You are deeply technical with a strong foundation in engineering and mathematics, and you can identify optimization opportunities across hardware, software, and AI.
• You are a resilient explorer who can forge new paths to achieve business goals when the route is not obvious.

Basic qualifications

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

Preferred qualifications

• 7+ years deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud).
• Experience designing, developing, integrating, delivering, and supporting complex AI systems.
• Ability to lead and mentor an engineering team and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Experience developing AI/ML algorithms or technologies (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 the ability to judiciously apply novel techniques in production.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, capable of articulating complex AI concepts to peers.