Director of AI Engineering — Remote Impact Leader

Capital One; Madison (WI); Remote; USD 245,000 - 335,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One seeks a Director, AI Engineer to lead cross-functional teams delivering AI-powered products with robust governance and observability. The role oversees foundation model training, inference, and optimization across Open Source and SaaS tech stacks, driving scalable, responsible AI implementations.

The candidate will shape the technical vision, attract top AI talent, and translate enterprise AI strategy into actionable roadmaps while promoting a culture of learning and innovation

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 8 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 6 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies
• At least 3 years of people leadership experience
• 5 years of experience managing and leading an engineering team
• 7 years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud)
• 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 in building agentic AI systems and agentic workflows
• Passion for staying abreast of the latest AI research and AI systems, and judiciously apply novel techniques in production
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate complex AI concepts to peers
• Experience building and leading multi-team AI organization delivering multiple enterprise products or capabilities concurrently
• Proven ability to expand and execute long-term AI platform strategies aligned to enterprise priorities and regulatory frameworks
• Experience establishing cross-functional operating rhythms and review cadences (OKRs, AI governance councils, quarterly reviews)
• Experience right-sizing models, instance counts, and hardware types given requirements (e.g., context length, token inputs, token outputs)

Responsibilities

• Partner with a cross-functional team of engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products that change how our associates work and how our customers interact with Capital One
• Oversee the design, development, testing, deployment, and support AI software components including foundation model training, large language model inference, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability, etc.
• Make high judgment build-vs-buy decisions across a broad stack of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch, and more
• Invent and introduce state-of-the-art foundation model optimization techniques to improve the performance — scalability, cost, latency, throughput — of large scale production AI systems
• Contribute to the technical vision and the long term roadmap of foundational AI systems at Capital One
• Attract and retain top talent in the AI industry and nurture personal and professional development for your team. Foster a culture of learning and staying abreast of the state-of-the-art in AI
• Translate the enterprise AI strategy into portfolio-level execution plans across multiple product areas, balancing innovation with delivery discipline
• Scale AI engineering practices across teams through shared infrastructure, reusable components, and unified observability and governance frameworks
• Establish enterprise standard for Responsible AI, including fairness metrics, model evaluation protocols, documentation requirements, and audit readiness
• Partner with research, compliance, and enterprise risk teams to ensure deployed systems meet emerging ethical and regulatory standards

Skills

Leadership experience

AI engineering

Cross-functional collaboration

People management

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's in CS/AI/EE/CE

Master's in CS/AI/EE/CE

Tools

Python

C

C#

Java

CUDA

Golang

Job description

Capital One seeks a Director, AI Engineer to lead cross-functional teams delivering AI-powered products with robust governance and observability. The role oversees foundation model training, inference, and optimization across Open Source and SaaS tech stacks, driving scalable, responsible AI implementations.

The candidate will shape the technical vision, attract top AI talent, and translate enterprise AI strategy into actionable roadmaps while promoting a culture of learning and innovation