Staff AI Engineer

The Staff AI Engineer role at Capital One is available in New York, NY with remote eligibility. The position focuses on building and deploying responsible, scalable enterprise AI systems across foundation model training, LLM inference, agents, evaluation, governance, and observability, with technical leadership for AI architecture and model orchestration.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with a cross-functional group of 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.
• Apply a broad stack of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies, including AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, and PyTorch.
• Develop state-of-the-art foundation model optimization approaches to improve production performance across scalability, cost, latency, and throughput.
• Help define the technical vision and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems at Capital One.
• Set enterprise-wide technical direction for AI architecture, including unifying tooling, observability, and deployment standards across teams.
• Own the design and integration of model routing, caching, and orchestration systems supporting hybrid and multi-model workloads.
• Apply responsible AI principles across system design, with attention to transparency, reproducibility, and fairness-by-design.
• Support internal education, mentorship, and dissemination of best practices through architecture councils and AI guilds.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 8 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master's degree in a related field plus at least 6 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies.
• At least 8 years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.

Technologies

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

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing AI systems with tradeoffs across cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
• 8+ 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.
• Ability to lead and mentor multiple engineering teams and influence cross-functional stakeholders up to the VP level.
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies (for example, LLM Inference, Similarity Search and VectorDBs, Guardrails, Memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang.
• Experience applying state-of-the-art techniques for optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Experience building agentic AI systems and agentic workflows.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills for explaining complex AI concepts to peers.
• Proven track record defining and operationalizing enterprise AI architecture standards, including data pipeline governance, observability, and evaluation frameworks.
• Experience leading federated or multi-cloud AI strategies to maximize resilience, compliance, and compute efficiency.
• Demonstrated success influencing research-to-production promotion processes, including model handoff, evaluation, and productization.
• Experience defining north-star metrics for AI systems balancing business value, innovation velocity, cost, and ethical responsibility.
• Experience right-sizing models, instance counts, and hardware types given requirements such as context length and token inputs/outputs.

Team Overview

The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team is responsible for bringing Capital One’s AI vision to life. The team partners with colleagues across the company to advance state-of-the-art science and AI engineering and to build and deploy proprietary solutions central to the business. Its AI models and platforms help teams across Capital One enhance products with responsible and scalable AI for high-leverage impact.

Benefits

• Performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI).
• Comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive health, financial, and other benefits that support total well-being.

Remote Eligibility and Location-Based Salary

• Remote (regardless of location): USD 244,700 - 279,200 for Staff AI Engineer
• Cambridge, MA: USD 269,100 - 307,200 for Staff AI Engineer
• McLean, VA: USD 269,100 - 307,200 for Staff AI Engineer
• New York, NY: USD 293,600 - 335,100 for Staff AI Engineer
• San Francisco, CA: USD 293,600 - 335,100 for Staff AI Engineer
• San Jose, CA: USD 293,600 - 335,100 for Staff AI Engineer

Additional Notes

• Capital One is open to hiring a Remote Employee for this opportunity.
• Capital One may consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
• Applications are expected to accept 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.
• For technical support or questions about Capital One’s recruiting process, email [email protected].