Sr. Lead AI Engineer (Gen AI Platform Services)

Capital One offers an onsite Sr. Lead AI Engineer position in McLean, VA with a competitive annual compensation range of USD 229,900 to 262,400. This role centers on designing, building, deploying, and supporting AI software components and foundational AI systems, leveraging Open Source and SaaS AI technologies to deliver AI powered products. The team emphasizes collaboration across engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to create solutions that transform how associates work and how customers interact with Capital One. In addition to a comprehensive benefits package, the role provides performance-based incentives and opportunities for ongoing learning and growth.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with a cross-functional team to deliver AI-powered products that impact internal processes and customer experiences.
• 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.
• Utilize 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 performance metrics such as scalability, cost, latency, and throughput for production AI systems.
• Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems at Capital One.

Requirements

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

Technologies

• AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, Nemo Guardrails, PyTorch
• Programming: Python, Go, Scala, Java, Golang

Benefits

• Health benefits covering medical, financial, and other protections.
• Performance-based incentive compensation, including cash bonuses and long-term incentives.

Ideal candidate

• Enjoys building systems and takes pride in delivering high-quality work while aligning with the goal of improving banking for good.
• Keeps pace with the latest AI research and can translate scholarly insights into production-ready solutions.
• Adapts quickly, brings clarity to complex problems, asks probing questions, and communicates findings concisely. Has the courage to propose new ideas, even if unproven.
• Strong technical foundation in engineering and mathematics, with fluency across hardware, software, and AI to identify optimization opportunities others may miss.
• Resilient and proactive, capable of forging new paths to achieve business goals when approaches are uncertain.

Preferred qualifications

• About 7 years of experience 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.
• Proven ability to lead and mentor an engineering team and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies such as LLM inference, similarity search, vector databases, guardrails, memory, using Python, C++, C#, Java, or Golang.
• Experience optimizing training and inference to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Passion for staying current with AI research and systems, applying novel techniques in production judiciously.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate complex AI concepts to peers.