AI Engineer 4 (AI Foundations: Benchmarking, Evaluation, and Explainability)

Capital One is building responsible, scalable AI capabilities through its Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team. In this onsite role in McLean, VA, you will help design and deliver AI software components for benchmarking, evaluation, and explainability that can be used across the organization to enhance customer and associate experiences.

What you’ll work on

As part of IFX, you will partner with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products. The work spans end-to-end development and operations for foundation model training and large language model inference, along with agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, and model evaluation.

• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components, including experimentation, governance, and observability
• Use a broad stack of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, and PyTorch
• Introduce foundation model optimization techniques to improve scalability, cost, latency, and throughput for large-scale production AI systems
• Contribute to the technical vision and long term roadmap for foundational AI systems
• Own end-to-end architecture for complex AI systems with a focus on maintainability, observability, and ethical alignment
• Define and maintain service-level objectives (SLOs) for AI reliability, including latency, uptime, and model performance drift
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineering to optimize GPU/TPU utilization and accelerate model inference pipelines
• Lead cross-functional technical reviews for new AI system deployments, ensuring security, data governance, and compliance standards are met
• Mentor Principal and Senior Associates on scalable design, performance tuning, and research-to-production translation

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field plus at least 4 years developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master’s degree in a related field plus at least 2 years in the same area
• At least 4 years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java

Helpful experience

• Experience leading development of AI systems with tradeoffs across cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy
• 6+ years deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud
• Experience designing, developing, delivering, and supporting AI services
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies such as LLM inference, similarity search and VectorDBs, guardrails, and 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
• Proficiency designing distributed systems for model training, evaluation, and online inference at petabyte scale
• Experience defining AI model governance processes, including producibility, lineage tracking, and automated retaining schedules
• Demonstrated ability to influence architectural decisions across multiple AI product lines or platforms

Salary and location

McLean, VA (onsite): USD 197,300 - 225,100 per year.

Benefits

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

Additional notes

• Capital One may sponsor authorization for new qualified applicants.
• 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.
• Capital One promotes a drug-free workplace.
• Capital One will consider qualified applicants with a criminal history in line with applicable laws.
• If you need accommodation to apply, contact Capital One Recruiting at 1-800-304-9102 or [email protected].
• For technical support or questions about the recruiting process, email [email protected].