Senior AI Engineering Lead - Foundation Models

Capital One; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 251,000 - 286,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One is seeking an onsite Sr. Manager, AI Engineer in San Jose, CA to lead the operationalization of responsible, scalable AI systems powering production foundation models.

You will blend hands-on execution with cross‑functional leadership to deliver measurable AI‑powered outcomes for associates and customers. The role requires building and guiding AI components across the lifecycle, optimizing model performance for scale and cost, and shaping the long‑term roadmap for foundational AI

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS/AI/EE or related field with 6+ years in AI/ML, or Master’s with 4+ years.
• At least 1 year of people leadership experience.
• Ability to translate enterprise AI goals into actionable roadmaps and measurable outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead cross‑functional teams to deliver AI-powered products that improve how associates work and how customers interact with Capital One.
• Oversee AI software lifecycle from design to deployment and support, including model training, inference, evaluation, and governance.
• Make high‑judgment build-versus-buy decisions across Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch.
• Drive state‑of‑the‑art foundation model optimization for scalability, cost, latency, and throughput.
• Contribute to the technical vision and long‑term roadmap for foundation AI systems at Capital One.
• Translate enterprise AI goals into actionable roadmaps with measurable outcomes and regular readouts.
• Operationalize Responsible AI with review gates, documentation, and rollout/rollback standards.
• Collaborate with Research, Data, and Platform teams to accelerate the model lifecycle.
• Attract and retain top AI talent and foster learning and growth within the team.

Skills

AI/ML algorithms

Leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/AI/EE/CE or related field

Master’s degree in related field

Tools

AWS Ultraclusters

Huggingface

VectorDBs

PyTorch

Python

C++

C#

Java

CUDA

Golang

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Capital One is seeking an onsite Sr. Manager, AI Engineer in San Jose, CA to lead the operationalization of responsible, scalable AI systems powering production foundation models.

You will blend hands-on execution with cross‑functional leadership to deliver measurable AI‑powered outcomes for associates and customers. The role requires building and guiding AI components across the lifecycle, optimizing model performance for scale and cost, and shaping the long‑term roadmap for foundational AI