AI Engineer

About The Company

Capital One is building responsible, reliable AI systems to help change banking for good. With a longstanding commitment to machine learning, the company creates real-time, personalized experiences that make banking simpler and more human. Its investments in technology, infrastructure, and talent support the development of scalable AI capabilities that serve customers and business teams.

The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team works with partners across Capital One to advance AI science and engineering. The team develops proprietary models and platforms that enable products and services to use AI responsibly, reliably, and at scale.

About The Role

Capital One is seeking an AI Engineer 5 to help design and deliver advanced AI systems and products. You will collaborate with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to develop capabilities that improve how associates work and how customers interact with the company. The role combines deep software engineering expertise with applied AI research and production systems design.

You will contribute to foundational AI platforms, including foundation model training, large language model inference, agentic workflows, similarity search, model evaluation, guardrails, experimentation, governance, and observability. You will also help shape the long-term technical direction of AI systems at Capital One, balancing model quality with scalability, latency, throughput, and operational cost.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, deploy, and support production AI software and platform components.
• Develop and optimize foundation model training and inference systems, including techniques that improve hardware utilization, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Build and integrate multi-model orchestration pipelines that combine large language models, vector search, retrieval, and domain-specific models.
• Develop agentic AI systems and workflows, including multi-agent applications where appropriate.
• Use technologies such as AWS, Hugging Face, PyTorch, and vector databases to build scalable solutions.
• Establish cost-performance governance practices that monitor GPU utilization, model throughput, inference cost, and system reliability.
• Lead design reviews and technical councils to promote consistent engineering practices and alignment with AI standards.
• Contribute to technical roadmaps, communicate complex concepts clearly, and mentor senior engineers to support cross-team learning.
• Apply current research thoughtfully to production systems and promote responsible, explainable, fair, and human-centered AI.
  
  

Qualifications

Applicants must have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field and at least six years of experience developing AI or machine learning technologies; or a relevant master’s degree and at least four years of such experience. At least six years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java is also required.

Preferred qualifications include experience leading complex AI systems on cloud platforms; building scalable, responsible production AI; and developing inference, similarity search, vector database, guardrail, memory, or agentic capabilities. Experience optimizing model training and inference, right-sizing models and infrastructure, and balancing accuracy, latency, throughput, and cost is valuable. Candidates should be comfortable evaluating emerging research, integrating heterogeneous AI components, and presenting technical decisions to peers.

Benefits

The annual salary range is $229,900–$262,400 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia, and $250,800–$286,200 in New York, New York, and San Jose, California. Pay ranges for other locations vary. The final salary offer will depend on work location and be stated in the offer letter. This position may also include performance-based incentives, such as cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives. Capital One offers health, financial, and other benefits; eligibility depends on role and employment status. Capital One will consider sponsorship for qualified applicants requiring employment authorization.

Equal Opportunity

Capital One is an equal opportunity employer, including disability and veteran status, and complies with applicable federal, state, and local nondiscrimination laws. Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered in accordance with applicable laws. Reasonable accommodations are available during the application process. Applications are expected to be accepted for at least five business days. No agencies, please.