Senior Staff AI Engineer - Agentic AI Platform

At Capital One, the Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team is focused on translating Capital One’s AI vision into production systems that support real business needs. In this Senior Staff AI Engineer role (remote eligible, McLean, VA), you will help design and scale agentic and foundation AI capabilities with a strong emphasis on reliability, performance, and responsible deployment.

What you’ll do

• Collaborate with cross-functional partners including engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered experiences for associates and customers.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components such as foundation model training, large language model inference, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Use a broad mix of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies, including AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, and PyTorch.
• Develop and introduce state-of-the-art optimization methods for foundation model training and inference to improve scalability, cost, latency, and throughput in large-scale production environments.
• Shape the technical vision and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems across Capital One.
• Define and guide AI architecture to integrate applied research advances into production ecosystems with reliability and scale.
• Help establish AI performance, safety, and transparency standards to guide company-wide model development and deployment.
• Lead multi-year platform efforts that unify data, compute, and model lifecycle management under a cohesive enterprise AI architecture.
• Mentor senior technical leaders across research, data, and engineering disciplines to develop future AI technical leadership at Capital One.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field plus at least 10 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master’s degree in a related field plus at least 8 years.
• At least 10 years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.

Technologies and focus areas

• Programming and platforms: Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, Java; AWS Ultraclusters
• AI tooling: Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch
• Core capabilities: foundation model training, large language model inference, agents, multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, observability
• Additional: Open Source and SaaS AI technologies

Preferred qualifications

• Experience architecting AI platforms with tradeoffs across cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
• 9+ years of experience deploying scalable, responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud.
• Experience architecting, designing, developing, integrating, delivering, and supporting complex AI systems.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and mentor multiple engineering teams and influence cross-functional stakeholders up to the SVP level.
• Experience developing AI/ML algorithms using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang (including LLM inference, similarity search and VectorDBs, guardrails, and memory).
• Experience optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Experience building agentic AI systems and agentic workflows.
• Strong communication skills to explain complex AI concepts to peers.
• Recognized industry leadership through patents, publications, or open-source contributions.
• Experience designing long-term AI infrastructure strategies balancing cost, scale, ethics, and regulatory compliance.
• Experience driving organization-wide adoption of AI safety, alignment, and governance standards with policy, risk, and legal teams.
• Ability to shape R&D investment strategy by identifying breakthrough capabilities with material business impact.
• Experience right-sizing models, instance counts, and hardware types based on requirements such as context length and token input/output needs.

Location and compensation

• Location: McLean, VA (remote); Remote hiring is available.
• Salary: USD 314,800 - 359,300 per year.
• This role may also be eligible for performance-based incentive compensation, including cash bonus(es) and/or long-term incentives (LTI).

Benefits

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial, and other benefits.

Capital One is open to sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position. No agencies please. Capital One is an equal opportunity employer and promotes a drug-free workplace. If you require an accommodation during the application process, contact Capital One Recruiting at 1-800-304-9102 or [email protected]. For technical support, email [email protected].