AI Engineer

About The Company
Capital One is building responsible, reliable AI systems to help change banking for good. With years of experience applying machine learning to personalized, real-time customer experiences, the company combines technology infrastructure, machine learning expertise, and world-class talent to develop innovative products and services. Its AI capabilities help customers and associates navigate banking with greater simplicity, including recognizing unusual activity and answering questions in real time.
The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team works with partners across Capital One to advance AI science and engineering. The team develops and deploys proprietary models and platforms that enable teams to bring AI into products responsibly and at scale, delivering meaningful value to millions of customers.
About The Role
Capital One is seeking an AI Engineer 5 to help shape and build foundational AI systems. In this senior technical role, you will collaborate with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to create AI-powered products and infrastructure for customers and associates. You will help guide technical direction, apply emerging research to production challenges, and improve the performance and reliability of large-scale AI systems.
Your work may span foundation model training, large language model inference, agentic and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, model evaluation, guardrails, experimentation, governance, and observability. You will use technologies across open-source and cloud ecosystems, potentially including AWS, Hugging Face, vector databases, and PyTorch. This position is available in Cambridge, Massachusetts; McLean, Virginia; New York, New York; and San Jose, California. Capital One will consider sponsorship for a new qualified applicant seeking employment authorization.
Responsibilities
Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components and production systems. Build and optimize multi-model orchestration pipelines that combine large language models, vector search, and domain-specific models. Develop techniques that improve scalability, hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost while maintaining model quality and responsible use.
Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems. Lead cost-performance governance reviews, monitoring measures such as GPU utilization, model throughput, and inference efficiency. Lead design councils or technical reviews that promote consistency with engineering standards. Mentor senior AI engineers and foster cross-domain learning. Stay informed about AI research and evaluate how new methods can be applied effectively and safely in production.
Qualifications
Applicants must have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field and at least six years of experience developing AI or machine learning algorithms or technologies; or a relevant master’s degree and at least four years of that experience. At least six years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java is required.
Preferred qualifications include experience leading complex AI systems and making tradeoffs among cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy; deploying scalable AI solutions on cloud platforms; and developing or applying AI technologies such as LLM inference, vector search, guardrails, memory, and agentic workflows. Experience with training or inference optimization, model compression, hardware selection, and right-sizing models is valuable. Candidates should be able to integrate generative, retrieval-augmented, and rule-based components, define responsible AI practices, communicate complex technical concepts, and work through ambiguous problems with sound engineering judgment.
Benefits
The full-time annual salary range is $229,900–$262,400 in Cambridge and McLean, and $250,800–$286,200 in New York City and San Jose. Pay ranges for other locations may differ. The actual salary offered will be stated in the offer letter. This role is also eligible for performance-based incentives, which may include cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives. Capital One offers a comprehensive benefits program supporting health, financial security, and overall well-being. Eligibility varies by role and employment status. Applications are expected to be accepted for at least five business days.
Equal Opportunity
Capital One is an equal opportunity employer committed to non-discrimination in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws, including protections for individuals with disabilities and veterans. The company maintains a drug-free workplace and considers qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with applicable laws. Reasonable accommodations are available during the application and hiring process. Information submitted for accommodation requests will be kept confidential and used only as needed to provide the requested assistance.

Work arrangement
Yes