Sr. Staff AI Engineer

Sr. Staff AI Engineer position with Capital One, remote eligible, focused on responsible, scalable AI platforms and AI-powered products.

Responsibilities

• Work with 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, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Use a stack of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch, and more.
• Develop and introduce foundation model optimization techniques to improve performance, including scalability, cost, latency, and throughput, for large-scale production AI systems.
• Shape the technical vision and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems at Capital One.
• Define and lead the technical AI architecture vision, integrating applied research breakthroughs into production ecosystems with reliability and scale.
• Establish AI performance, safety, and transparency standards that guide model development and deployment across the company.
• Lead multi-year platform initiatives to unify data, compute, and model lifecycle management under a cohesive enterprise AI architecture.
• Mentor senior technical leaders across research, data, and engineering to build the next generation of Capital One AI technical leadership.

Requirements

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

Technologies

• AWS Ultraclusters
• Huggingface
• VectorDBs
• PyTorch
• Python
• Go
• Scala
• CUDA
• Java

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience architecting AI platforms with tradeoff decisions across cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
• 9+ years deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (e.g., 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 or technologies (e.g., LLM inference, similarity search and VectorDBs, guardrails, memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang.
• Experience developing and applying state-of-the-art techniques to optimize training and inference software for improved hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Experience building agentic AI systems and agentic workflows.
• Ability to stay current with AI research and apply novel techniques judiciously in production.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills for explaining complex AI concepts to peers.
• Recognized industry leader in applied AI/ML 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 and token inputs/outputs.

Team Description

• The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team brings Capital One’s AI vision to life.
• The team partners across the company to advance the state of the art in science and AI engineering and builds and deploys proprietary solutions central to the business.
• IFX develops and deploys AI models and platforms to help teams enhance products with responsible and scalable AI.
• Work supports high-leverage impact for millions of customers.

Benefits

• Comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial, and other benefits.
• Performance based incentive compensation eligibility, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI).

Location

• New York, NY (remote)

Salary

• USD 343,400 - 392,000 per year (New York, NY)
• USD 286,200 - 326,700 per year (Remote, regardless of location)
• USD 314,800 - 359,300 per year (Cambridge, MA)
• USD 314,800 - 359,300 per year (McLean, VA)
• USD 343,400 - 392,000 per year (San Francisco, CA)
• USD 343,400 - 392,000 per year (San Jose, CA)

Additional Information

• Capital One is open to hiring a Remote Employee for this opportunity.
• Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
• Applications are expected to be accepted for a minimum of 5 business days.
• No agencies please.
• Capital One is an equal opportunity employer (EOE, including disability/vet) committed to non-discrimination in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
• Capital One promotes a drug-free workplace.
• Capital One does not provide, endorse, or guarantee third-party products, services, educational tools, or other information on this site.
• Accommodation for applicants can be requested by contacting Capital One Recruiting at 1-800-304-9102 or via [email protected].
• For technical support or questions about Capital One’s recruiting process, email [email protected].