AI Engineer

Job Description

Capital One is an industry leader in applying machine learning to create real-time, personalized customer experiences. We use technology, data science, and thoughtful engineering to make banking simpler and more helpful, from identifying unusual charges to answering customer questions. Our continued investment in world-class talent and modern infrastructure supports the development of responsible, reliable AI capabilities that serve customers and businesses at scale.

The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team works across Capital One to advance AI science and engineering. The team develops proprietary models and platforms that help product teams deliver useful, responsible AI experiences to millions of customers. Join a collaborative organization focused on bringing emerging AI capabilities into production with care, performance, and meaningful impact.

About The Role

As an AI Engineer 4 specializing in AI safety and multimodal systems, you will design and deliver foundational AI capabilities and production-ready products. You will partner with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product leaders to improve how associates work and how customers interact with Capital One. You will help translate research into robust systems, guide technical direction, and ensure that AI solutions are scalable, observable, secure, and ethically aligned.

This role includes hands-on work across foundation models, large language model inference, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, safety guardrails, evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability. You will apply current research and engineering practices to multimodal applications, including systems that combine image, video, and text.

Qualifications

Basic qualifications include a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field and at least four years of experience developing AI or machine learning algorithms or technologies; or a relevant master’s degree and at least two years of such experience. Candidates must also have at least four years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.

Preferred experience includes leading AI system development and making informed tradeoffs among cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy; deploying scalable, responsible AI on cloud platforms; and designing, delivering, and supporting AI services. Familiarity with AI safety, LLM alignment, red teaming, multimodal vulnerability assessment, agentic systems, vector databases, inference optimization, and distributed training or evaluation is valuable. Experience with AI governance, lineage, retraining processes, and influencing architecture across product lines is also beneficial. A strong engineering and mathematical foundation, sound judgment, curiosity, and the ability to explain complex findings clearly will help you succeed.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components and services. Build and improve foundation model training and inference, agent workflows, similarity search, safety guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and monitoring. Apply open-source and cloud technologies, including tools such as PyTorch, Hugging Face, vector databases, and AWS infrastructure.

Develop optimization approaches that improve production system scalability, GPU or other accelerator utilization, latency, throughput, and cost. Own architecture for complex AI systems and establish service-level objectives for reliability, uptime, latency, and model performance. Collaborate with infrastructure teams and lead technical reviews to address security, data governance, and compliance. Contribute to long-term platform direction and mentor colleagues in scalable design, performance tuning, and the transition from research to production.

Benefits

Capital One offers a competitive total rewards package, including health, financial, and other benefits that support employee well-being. This role may also be eligible for performance-based compensation, including cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives, subject to the applicable plan and eligibility requirements. Benefits eligibility varies by employment status and management level.

Annual salary ranges are $197,300–$225,100 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia, and $215,200–$245,600 in New York, New York, and San Jose, California. Pay for other locations will follow the applicable location range; the offer letter will confirm the salary offered. Capital One will consider employment authorization sponsorship for qualified applicants. The position is expected to accept applications for at least five business days.

Equal Opportunity

Capital One is an equal opportunity employer, including for individuals with disabilities and veterans, and complies with applicable federal, state, and local nondiscrimination laws. The company promotes a drug-free workplace and considers qualified applicants with criminal histories in accordance with applicable laws. Applicants who need an accommodation during the recruiting process may contact Capital One Recruiting. Information provided for accommodation purposes will be kept confidential and used only as needed.