Capital One is seeking a Senior Lead AI Engineer who will own AI foundations, LLM core development, and agentic AI initiatives. This on-site role in McLean, Virginia focuses on building responsible, scalable AI systems, partnering with cross-functional teams to deliver AI-powered products, and advancing foundational AI efforts and LLM optimization. The position offers a salary range of USD 229,900 to 262,400 per year and requires a master's degree with at least four years of relevant AI/ML experience (or a bachelor's with at least six years) along with strong Python, Go, Scala, or Java programming skills.
Overview
Capital One is focused on creating responsible and reliable AI systems and has a history of using machine learning to deliver real-time, personalized customer experiences. The company continues to invest in technology infrastructure and top talent to lead in enterprise AI, applying advanced AI techniques to support customer interactions and risk-aware decision making.
Responsibilities
- Collaborate with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products that transform 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, 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 scalability, cost, latency, and throughput of large-scale production AI systems.
- Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap of foundational AI systems at Capital One.
Basic Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields with at least 6 years of AI/ML development experience; or Master's degree in these fields with at least 4 years of AI/ML experience.
- At least 6 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, or Java.
Preferred Qualifications
- 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.
- Ability to lead and mentor an engineering team and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
- Experience developing AI/ML algorithms or technologies (e.g., LLM Inference, Similarity Search and VectorDBs, Guardrails, Memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, or Golang.
- Experience optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
- Stays current with AI research and AI systems, applying novel techniques in production when appropriate.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills for articulating complex AI concepts to peers.
Technologies
- AWS Ultraclusters
- Huggingface
- VectorDBs
- Nemo Guardrails
- PyTorch
- Python
- Go
- Scala
- Java
Benefits
- Health benefits
- Performance-based incentive compensation
- Long term incentives (LTI)
Team Description
The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team sits at the heart of Capital One's AI efforts. We work across the company to advance AI science and engineering, building and deploying proprietary solutions that deliver value to millions of customers. Our AI models and platforms empower teams to enhance products with the transformative power of AI.
The Ideal Candidate
You enjoy building robust systems, take pride in code quality, and are committed to doing the right thing. You tackle problems that can change banking for good, stay current with the latest research, and translate complex findings into production-ready approaches. You communicate clearly, ask thoughtful questions, and are comfortable proposing new ideas even when unproven. You are deeply technical with a strong foundation in engineering and mathematics, able to spot optimization opportunities across hardware and software. You are a resilient trailblazer who can chart new paths to meet business goals when the route is unclear.
