Sr. Staff AI Engineer

Sr. Staff AI Engineer

At Capital One, we are creating responsible and reliable AI systems, changing banking for good. For years, Capital One has been an industry leader in using machine learning to create real-time, personalized customer experiences. Our investments in technology infrastructure and world-class talent — along with our deep experience in machine learning — position us to be at the forefront of enterprises leveraging AI. From informing customers about unusual charges to answering their questions in real time, our applications of AI & ML are bringing humanity and simplicity to banking. We are committed to continuing to build world-class applied science and engineering teams to deliver our industry leading capabilities with breakthrough product experiences and scalable, high-performance AI infrastructure. At Capital One, you will help bring the transformative power of emerging AI capabilities to reimagine how we serve our customers and businesses who have come to love the products and services we build.

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.

The minimum and maximum full-time annual salaries for this role are listed below, by location. Please note that this salary information is solely for candidates hired to perform work within one of these locations, and refers to the amount Capital One is willing to pay at the time of this posting. Salaries for part-time roles will be prorated based upon the agreed upon number of hours to be regularly worked.

Cambridge, MA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr. Staff AI EngineerMcLean, VA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr. Staff AI EngineerNew York, NY: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Staff AI EngineerRichmond, VA: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr. Staff AI EngineerSan Francisco, CA: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Staff AI EngineerSan Jose, CA: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Staff AI Engineer

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location, and the actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate’s offer letter.

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 theCapital One Careers website. Eligibility varies based on full or part-time status, exempt or non-exempt status, and management level.

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. 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.

If you have visited our website in search of information on employment opportunities or to apply for a position, and you require an accommodation, please contact Capital One Recruiting at 1-800-304-9102 or via email at RecruitingAccommodation@capitalone.com. All information you provide will be kept confidential and will be used only to the extent required to provide needed reasonable accommodations.

For technical support or questions about Capital One's recruiting process, please send an email to Careers@capitalone.com

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).