Sr. Staff AI Engineer

Capital One is seeking a Senior Staff AI Engineer to design, build, deploy, and support AI software components and foundational AI systems. This onsite role in McLean focuses on foundation model training and inference, agent workflows, search, guardrails, evaluation, governance, observability, and long-term AI platform architecture.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams of engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered capabilities that improve 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, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Use a combination of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch, and other related tooling.
• Develop state-of-the-art foundation model optimization techniques to improve production performance, including scalability, cost, latency, and throughput.
• Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems at Capital One.
• Define and guide technical AI architecture, integrating applied research advancements into production environments that meet reliability and scale requirements.
• Help establish AI performance, safety, and transparency standards that guide model development and deployment across the company.
• Drive multi-year platform initiatives that unify data, compute, and model lifecycle management under a cohesive enterprise AI architecture.
• Mentor senior technical leaders across research, data, and engineering groups to develop Capital One’s next generation of AI technical leadership.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field plus at least 10 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master's degree in a related field plus at least 8 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies.
• At least 10 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.

Technology Focus

• Programming: Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, Java
• AI platforms and tooling: AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch
• Deployment ecosystem: Open Source, SaaS

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience architecting AI platforms with tradeoff decisions across cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
• 9 years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud.
• Experience architecting, designing, developing, integrating, delivering, and supporting complex AI systems.
• Proven ability to lead and mentor multiple engineering teams and influence cross-functional stakeholders up to the SVP level.
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies (e.g., LLM inference, similarity search and VectorDBs, guardrails, memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang.
• Experience applying state-of-the-art techniques for optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Experience building agentic AI systems and agentic workflows.
• Demonstrated communication and presentation skills, including the ability to explain complex AI concepts to peers.
• Recognition as an industry leader in applied AI or machine learning infrastructure through patents, publications, or open-source leadership.
• Experience designing long-term AI infrastructure strategies balancing cost, scale, ethics, and regulatory compliance.
• Experience driving organization-wide adoption of AI safety, alignment, and governance standards in collaboration with policy, risk, and legal teams.
• Proven ability to shape R&D investment strategy by identifying breakthrough AI capabilities with material business impact.
• Experience right-sizing models, instance counts, and hardware types based on requirements such as context length, token inputs, and token outputs.

Location and Salary

Location: McLean, VA (onsite)

Salary: USD 314,800 - 359,300 per year

Additional Employment Information

• Capital One may sponsor a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
• Eligible for performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long-term incentives (LTI). Incentives may be discretionary or non-discretionary depending on the plan.
• 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 in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
• Capital One promotes a drug-free workplace.