Lead AI Engineer: Foundation Models & VLM Optimization

Capital One; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 197,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One is seeking a Lead AI Engineer (AI Foundations, VLM Customization) to advance foundation models and AI systems in production, collaborating with engineers, researchers, and product teams. You will help build scalable AI services and optimize LLM workflows across Capital One.

You will contribute to the technical vision, tackle hard AI challenges, and drive responsible AI adoption with a focus on performance, cost, and reliability in a fast-paced banking environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree with at least 4 years of AI/ML algorithm development experience, or Master’s with at least 2 years of experience.
• At least 4 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, or Java.
• 6 years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
• Experience designing, delivering, and supporting AI services and ML algorithms/technologies (e.g., LLM inference, similarity search, VectorDBs, guardrails)

Responsibilities

• Partner with a cross-functional team to deliver AI-powered products that change how associates work and how customers interact with Capital One.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components including foundation model training, LLM inference, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Leverage Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, Nemo Guardrails, PyTorch, and more.
• Invent and introduce state-of-the-art LLM optimization techniques to improve 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.

Skills

Python

Go

Scala

Java

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields

Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields

Tools

AWS Ultraclusters

Huggingface

VectorDBs

Nemo Guardrails

PyTorch

Job description

Capital One is seeking a Lead AI Engineer (AI Foundations, VLM Customization) to advance foundation models and AI systems in production, collaborating with engineers, researchers, and product teams. You will help build scalable AI services and optimize LLM workflows across Capital One.

You will contribute to the technical vision, tackle hard AI challenges, and drive responsible AI adoption with a focus on performance, cost, and reliability in a fast-paced banking environment.