Sr. Staff AI Engineer

Capital One National Association; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 315,000 - 359,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Sponsorship for employment eligibility

Job summary

Capital One is seeking a Sr. Staff AI Engineer to lead Foundation AI systems. You will collaborate with engineers, researchers, PMs, and product teams to deliver AI-powered products impacting millions of customers.

Responsibilities include training and inference of foundation models, optimization for cost and latency, and governance across production systems. The role emphasizes mentorship and architectural leadership across Capital One.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in CS/AI/EE/CE or related field with 8–10+ years of AI/ML experience.
• At least 10 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.

Responsibilities

• Partner with a cross-functional team to deliver AI-powered products.
• Design, develop, test, deploy and support AI software components including foundation model training, LLM inference, agents and workflows.
• Leverage 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 performance, cost, latency, and throughput.
• Contribute to the technical vision and the long term roadmap of foundational AI systems at Capital One.
• Define and steer the technical AI architecture vision, integrating breakthroughs into production ecosystems with reliability and scale.
• Lead the establishment of AI performance, safety, and transparency standards across model development and deployment.
• Drive multi-year platform initiatives unifying data, compute and model lifecycle management.
• Mentor senior technical leaders across research, data and engineering disciplines.

Skills

Python

Java

Go

Scala

CUDA

C++

C#

Golang

Leadership

Mentoring

Communication

Education

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

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

Tools

AWS Ultraclusters

HuggingFace

VectorDBs

PyTorch

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Team Description:

The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team is at the center of bringing our vision for AI at Capital One to life. We work hand-in-hand with our partners across the company to advance the state of the art in science and AI engineering, and we build and deploy proprietary solutions that are central to our business and deliver value to millions of customers. Our AI models and platforms empower teams across Capital One to enhance their products with the transformative power of AI, in responsible and scalable ways for the highest leverage impact.

What You’ll Do:

• 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.
• 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, etc.
• Leverage 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.
• Define and steer the technical AI architecture vision, integrating applied research breakthroughs into production ecosystems with reliability and scale
• Lead the establishment of AI performance, safety, and transparency standards that guide all model development and deployment company-wide
• Drive multi-year platform initiatives that unify data, compute and model lifecycle management under and cohesive enterprise AI architecture
• Mentor senior technical leaders across research, data and engineering disciplines, developing the next generation of Capital One’s AI technical leadership

Basic 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 Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields 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

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience architecting AI platforms with tradeoff decisions 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
• Demonstrated 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 for optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost
• 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
• Recognized industry leader in applied AI or machine learning infrastructure through patents, publications, or open-source leadership
• Demonstrated 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, collaborating 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 given requirements (e.g., context length, token inputs, token outputs)

Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.

Cambridge, MA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr. Staff AI Engineer

McLean, VA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr. Staff AI Engineer

New York, NY: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Staff AI Engineer

Richmond, VA: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr. Staff AI Engineer

San Francisco, CA: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Staff AI Engineer

San Jose, CA: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Staff AI Engineer

This role is also eligible to earn performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI). Incentives could be discretionary or non discretionary depending on the plan.

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well-being. Learn more at the Capital One Careers website. Eligibility varies based on full or part-time status, exempt or non-exempt status, and management level.

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.

Capital One will consider for employment qualified applicants with a criminal history in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable laws regarding criminal background inquiries, including, to the extent applicable, Article 23-A of the New York Correction Law; San Francisco, California Police Code Article 49, Sections 4901-4920; New York City’s Fair Chance Act; Philadelphia’s Fair Criminal Records Screening Act; and other applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations regarding criminal background inquiries.

Capital One does not provide, endorse nor guarantee and is not liable for third-party products, services, educational tools or other information available through this site.

Capital One Financial is made up of several different entities. Please note that any position posted in Canada is for Capital One Canada, any position posted in the United Kingdom is for Capital One Europe and any position posted in the Philippines is for Capital One Philippines Service Corp. (COPSSC).