Sr. Lead AI Engineer (AI Foundations)

Overview

This onsite role in New York, NY offers a path to influence how Capital One builds AI foundations that power both associates and customers. The Sr. Lead AI Engineer (AI Foundations) role focuses on designing, training, and optimizing foundation models and LLM systems, with a clear chance to contribute to a long-term technical roadmap. The position carries a competitive annual salary of USD 250,800 to 286,200 and invites collaboration across engineering, research, program management, and product teams to deliver AI powered solutions.

A Master’s degree is required, with either 4+ years of AI/ML experience or a Bachelor's degree with 6+ years of AI/ML experience, ensuring you bring both depth and leadership to the role.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with a cross functional group of engineers, researchers, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI driven products that transform how associates work and how customers interact with Capital One.
• Architect, implement, test, deploy, and maintain AI software components, including foundation model training, LLM inference, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Leverage a broad mix of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Hugging Face, VectorDBs, Nemo Guardrails, PyTorch, and related tools.
• Develop and apply state-of-the-art LLM optimization techniques to improve scalability, cost, latency, and throughput for large scale production AI systems.
• Contribute to the technical vision and the long term roadmap of foundational AI systems at Capital One.

Requirements

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields with at least 6 years of AI/ML algorithm development experience, or a Master’s degree with at least 4 years of AI/ML experience.
• At least 6 years of programming experience in Python, Go, Scala, or Java.
• 7 years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud.
• Experience designing, developing, integrating, delivering, and supporting complex AI systems.
• Proven ability to lead and mentor an engineering team and influence cross functional stakeholders.
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies (for example LLM inference, similarity search and vector databases, guardrails, memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, or Golang.
• Experience improving training and inference software to optimize hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Interest in staying current with AI research and systems, and applying novel techniques in production where appropriate.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to explain complex AI concepts to peers.

Technologies

• AWS Ultraclusters
• Hugging Face
• VectorDBs
• Nemo Guardrails
• PyTorch
• Python
• Go
• Scala
• Java