Sr. Staff AI Engineer

Capital One’s Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team brings the company’s AI vision to life by building and deploying proprietary AI solutions that help teams and support customers in responsible, scalable ways. In this remote eligible Sr. Staff AI Engineer role, you will help design and lead the architecture and standards behind foundation model training, LLM inference, agents and workflows, evaluation, governance, and observability.

What you’ll do

• Partner with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products that influence 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 broad stack of open source and SaaS technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, and PyTorch.
• Introduce foundation model optimization techniques that improve production performance across scalability, cost, latency, and throughput.
• Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems at Capital One.
• Define and steer technical AI architecture, integrating applied research breakthroughs into production ecosystems with reliability and scale.
• Lead the establishment of AI performance, safety, and transparency standards that guide model development and deployment company-wide.
• 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 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 related fields 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.
• At least 10 years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience architecting AI platforms with tradeoffs around cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
• 9+ years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud).
• Experience architecting, designing, developing, integrating, delivering, and supporting complex AI systems.
• 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 developing and applying state-of-the-art techniques to optimize training and inference software for improved hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Experience building agentic AI systems and agentic workflows.
• Ability to stay current with AI research and apply novel techniques judiciously in production.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, including the ability to articulate complex AI concepts to peers.
• Recognized 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 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 and token inputs/outputs.

Tools and technologies

• AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch
• Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, Java

Compensation and benefits

• Comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits.
• Performance based incentive compensation eligibility, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI).

Salary (Remote, regardless of location): $286,200 - $326,700 per year.
New York, NY: $343,400 - $392,000 per year.

Location and hiring notes

• Location: New York, NY (remote).
• Capital One is open to hiring a Remote Employee for this opportunity.
• Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
• This role is expected to accept applications 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.
• For accommodations during the application process, contact Capital One Recruiting at 1-800-304-9102 or [email protected].
• For technical support or questions about the recruiting process, email [email protected].