Lead AI Engineer (AI Foundations)

What Capital One offers

Capital One is building responsible and reliable AI systems that change banking for good. This onsite role in McLean, Virginia sits within the Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team, a central hub for AI engineering across the company. You will collaborate with partners across the organization to deliver AI powered solutions that impact both associates and customers.

Compensation includes a salary range of USD 197,300 to 225,100 per year. In addition to pay, Capital One provides health, financial and other benefits that support total well being, along with a performance based incentive program that can include cash bonuses and long term incentives.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with a cross functional team of engineers, research scientists, technical program managers and product managers to deliver AI driven products that impact 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.
• Work with a broad stack of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, Nemo Guardrails and PyTorch.
• 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 for foundational AI systems at Capital One.

Requirements

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

Technologies

• AWS Ultraclusters
• Huggingface
• VectorDBs
• Nemo Guardrails
• PyTorch

Benefits

• Health, financial and other benefits that support total well being
• Performance based incentive compensation including cash bonuses and or long term incentives

Overview

Capital One is focused on responsible, reliable AI systems and real time, personalized experiences for customers. The company invests in technology infrastructure and deep expertise in machine learning to remain at the forefront of AI in enterprise settings, enabling capabilities from handling unusual charges to answering customer questions with AI powered support.

Team description

The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team sits at the center of bringing Capital One's AI vision to life. We partner with teams across the company to advance AI research and engineering, building and deploying proprietary solutions that drive value for millions of customers. Our models and platforms empower colleagues to enhance products through AI.

The ideal candidate

• You enjoy building systems, take pride in code quality and are motivated to do the right thing, with a focus on meaningful impact in banking.
• You stay current with the latest research and can thoughtfully apply novel techniques in production settings.
• You adapt quickly, seek clarity in complex problems, ask questions, and articulate findings concisely; you are prepared to share new ideas even when not fully proven.
• You are deeply technical with a strong foundation in engineering and mathematics, and you recognize optimization opportunities across hardware, software and AI.
• You are a resilient trail blazer who can forge new paths to achieve business goals when the route is unclear.

Preferred qualifications

• Six years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or equivalent private clouds.
• Experience designing, developing, delivering and supporting AI services.
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies including LLM inference, similarity search and vector databases, guardrails and memory using Python, C++, C#, Java or Golang.
• Experience optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput and cost.
• Passion for staying current with AI research and AI systems, and applying new techniques in production when appropriate.