Sr. Staff AI Engineer
$315k - $359k • McLean, VA • Full-time
Posted 25d ago
About the job
Capital One is seeking a Sr. Staff AI Engineer to join the Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team. This role is central to bringing the company's AI vision to life, working with partners across the organization to advance AI science and engineering. The team builds and deploys proprietary solutions that are critical to the business and impact millions of customers. You will help bring the transformative power of emerging AI capabilities to reimagine how we serve customers and businesses, building world-class applied science and engineering teams to deliver industry-leading capabilities with breakthrough product experiences and scalable, high-performance AI infrastructure.
Responsibilities
- Partner with cross-functional teams to deliver AI-powered products.
- Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components including foundation model training, LLM inference, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
- Leverage Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, and PyTorch.
- Invent and introduce state-of-the-art foundation model optimization techniques to improve performance (scalability, cost, latency, throughput) of large-scale production AI systems.
- Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap of foundational AI systems.
- 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 company-wide.
- Drive multi-year platform initiatives that unify data, compute, and model lifecycle management under a cohesive enterprise AI architecture.
- Mentor senior technical leaders across research, data, and engineering disciplines.
Requirements
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Experience driving organization-wide adoption of AI safety, alignment, and governance standards.
- 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.