Capital One is seeking an AI Engineer 3 to join the Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team in McLean, VA (onsite). In this role, you will help design, build, and deploy responsible, scalable foundation-model and agent systems that power AI experiences for associates and customers.
Role Summary
You will collaborate with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products. The focus includes foundation-model training, large language model inference, agent and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
Key Responsibilities
- Partner with cross-functional teams to deliver AI-powered products that improve how associates work and how customers interact with Capital One.
- Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components, including foundation model training, LLM inference, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
- Use open source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch, and additional supporting tools.
- Introduce state-of-the-art foundation model optimization techniques to improve performance across scalability, cost, latency, and throughput for production AI systems.
- Contribute to the technical vision and the long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems within Capital One.
- Lead development and benchmarking of multi-turn conversational and tool-using agent workflows, with measurable performance and safety metrics.
- Implement scalable pipelines for training, fine-tuning, and deploying foundation or domain-specific models across multiple environments.
- Collaborate with research and data engineering teams to curate high-quality datasets and strengthen model evaluation methodologies.
- Support governance and security efforts for model traceability, lineage documentation, and version control of deployed AI assets.
- Mentor junior AI engineers and advocate for engineering excellence, reproducibility, and responsible experimentation.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 3 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master's degree in the same fields plus at least 1 year of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies.
- At least 3 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.
Technologies
- AWS Ultraclusters
- Huggingface
- VectorDBs
- PyTorch
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Azure
- Python
- Go
- Scala
- CUDA
- Java
- C++
- C#
- Golang
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience contributing to AI system components with tradeoff decisions around cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
- 4 years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud).
- Experience developing, delivering, and supporting AI services.
- Experience developing AI and 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 for optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
- Experience building agentic AI systems and agentic workflows.
- Demonstrated ability to evaluate and optimize LLM performance using quantitative metrics (accuracy, coherence, latency, cost).
- Hands-on experience implementing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector database integrations, and fine-tuning workflows.
- Experience applying prompt-engineering strategies, safety guardrails, and red-teaming methodologies to production AI systems.
Compensation and Incentives
- Base salary (McLean, VA): USD 161,800 - 184,600 per year
- Performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI)
Team Description
The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team is central to bringing Capital One’s AI vision to life. The team works with partners across the company to advance the state of the art in science and AI engineering, build and deploy proprietary solutions, and support AI models and platforms that help teams enhance products with responsible, scalable AI for high-leverage impact.
Additional Information
- McLean, VA is listed as an onsite location.
- Capital One Financial is made up of several different entities: positions posted in Canada are for Capital One Canada; positions posted in the United Kingdom are for Capital One Europe; and positions posted in the Philippines are for Capital One Philippines Service Corp. (COPSSC).
