Senior Lead AI Engineer

Senior Lead AI Engineer in Capital One's GenAI Platform Services leads the design, development, and optimization of AI software components and foundational AI systems. This on-site role located in McLean, VA offers a salary range of USD 229,900 to 262,400 per year and requires a Master’s degree with substantial AI/ML experience.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with a cross-functional team of engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered solutions that impact associates and customers.
• 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.
• Leverage a broad stack of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, Nemo Guardrails, PyTorch, and other tools.
• Invent and apply state-of-the-art LLM optimization techniques to improve scalability, cost efficiency, latency, and throughput for large-scale production AI systems.
• Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap of foundational AI systems at Capital One.

Requirements

• Education and experience: a 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 a Master’s degree in the same fields with at least 4 years of AI/ML development experience.
• Programming proficiency: at least 6 years of experience coding in Python, Go, Scala, or Java.

Technologies

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

Benefits

• Health benefits
• Financial benefits
• Performance-based incentive compensation

Overview

Capital One aims to build responsible and reliable AI systems that transform banking for good. The company has a history of using machine learning to create real-time, personalized customer experiences, supported by strong technology infrastructure and talent. The AI strategy focuses on scalable, secure, and transparent AI platforms that enable teams to deliver value to millions of customers.

Team Description

The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences team drives Capital One's AI vision by partnering across the organization to advance AI engineering and science. The team develops and deploys proprietary AI solutions that are central to business operations and customer value, empowering product teams with foundational AI capabilities.

The Ideal Candidate

• Enjoys building systems, values code quality, and is committed to doing the right thing for the business and customers.
• Keeps current with AI research and can translate scientific publications into production-ready techniques.
• Adaptive and capable of clarifying large, undefined problems; asks questions and communicates findings clearly; comfortable sharing new ideas even if unproven.
• Deeply technical with a strong foundation in engineering and mathematics; can identify and exploit optimization opportunities across hardware, software, and AI.
• Resilient and capable of forging new paths to achieve business goals when the route is uncertain.

Basic Qualifications

• Education and experience: a 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 a Master’s degree in the same fields with at least 4 years of AI/ML development experience.
• Programming proficiency: at least 6 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, or Java.

Preferred Qualifications

• Seven 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.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and mentor an engineering team and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies (eg 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.
• Passion for staying current with AI research and systems, and applying novel techniques in production when appropriate.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills with the ability to convey complex AI concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.