Sr. Staff AI Engineer

Capital One is building foundational AI capabilities that help associates work more effectively and enable customers to interact with confidence. As a Sr. Staff AI Engineer in McLean, VA (onsite), you will design, develop, deploy, and support AI software components and foundational AI systems spanning training and inference, agent workflows, search, guardrails, evaluation, governance, observability, and long-term AI platform architecture.

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 engage with Capital One.
• Design, build, test, deploy, and maintain AI software components such as foundation model training, LLM inference, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Apply a broad toolkit of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies including AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch, and more.
• Introduce state-of-the-art foundation model optimization techniques to improve production performance including scalability, cost, latency, and throughput.
• Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems at Capital One.
• Define and steer the AI architecture vision by integrating applied research breakthroughs into production ecosystems with reliability and scale.
• Lead the establishment of AI performance, safety, and transparency standards that guide model development and deployment across the company.
• Drive multi-year platform initiatives 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 the next generation of Capital One’s AI technical leadership.

Requirements

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

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience architecting AI platforms with tradeoffs around cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
• 9 years of experience deploying scalable and 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 and applying AI/ML technologies (for example: LLM inference, similarity search and VectorDBs, guardrails, memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang.
• Experience optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Experience building agentic AI systems and agentic workflows.
• Strong communication and presentation skills to articulate complex AI concepts.
• Recognized industry leader in applied AI or machine learning infrastructure through patents, publications, or open-source leadership.
• 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.
• Proven ability to shape R&D investment strategy by identifying breakthrough AI capabilities with material business impact.
• Experience right-sizing models, instance counts, and hardware types based on requirements such as context length, token inputs, and token outputs.
• Passion for staying abreast of AI research and judiciously applying novel techniques in production.

Salary and Incentives

USD 314,800 - 359,300 per year for the McLean, VA location.

• Eligible for performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long-term incentives (LTI). Incentives may be discretionary or non-discretionary depending on the plan.

Employment Details

• Capital One may consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
• Expected minimum application window: 5 business days.
• No agencies please.
• Capital One is an equal opportunity employer (EOE), committed to non-discrimination in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws, including disability and veteran status.
• Capital One promotes a drug-free workplace.