AI Engineer 5 (Gen AI Platform Services: Agentic AI, Guardrails, Evaluation)

About the role

Capital One is building responsible and reliable AI systems to transform banking. The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team creates proprietary AI models and platforms that empower millions of customers and internal teams, delivering high‑impact, scalable solutions.

Team description

The IFX team partners across the company to advance state‑of‑the‑art AI science and engineering, building and deploying solutions that are central to the business while ensuring responsible, scalable impact.

Responsibilities

• Partner with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI‑powered products for associates and customers.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components such as foundation‑model training, large language model inference, agents and multi‑agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Leverage a broad stack of open‑source and SaaS AI technologies (e.g., AWS Ultraclusters, HuggingFace, VectorDBs, PyTorch).
• Invent and apply state‑of‑the‑art foundation‑model optimization techniques to improve scalability, cost, latency, and throughput of large‑scale production AI systems.
• Contribute to the technical vision and long‑term roadmap of foundational AI systems at Capital One.
• Design, implement, and optimize multi‑model orchestration pipelines that integrate LLMs, vector search, and domain‑specific models.
• Establish and lead cost‑performance governance reviews, tracking GPU utilization, model throughput, and inference cost efficiency.
• Lead design councils or review boards to ensure technical consistency and compliance with AI engineering standards.
• Mentor Principal and Manager‑level AI engineers, fostering cross‑domain learning and elevating organizational technical maturity.

Ideal candidate

• Passionate about building high‑quality systems and doing the right thing.
• Enthusiastic about staying current with AI research and applying novel techniques in production.
• Thrives on clarifying big, undefined problems and articulating findings concisely.
• Courageous in sharing unproven ideas.
• Strong engineering and mathematics foundation; adept at hardware, software, and AI optimization.
• Resilient trailblazer who can forge new paths to achieve business goals.

Basic qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field + ≥ 6 years developing AI/ML algorithms or technologies, or Master’s degree + ≥ 4 years experience.
• ≥ 6 years programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience leading AI system development with trade‑offs around cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
• ≥ 7 years deploying scalable, responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud).
• Designing, developing, delivering, and supporting complex AI systems.
• Developing AI/ML algorithms (e.g., LLM inference, similarity search, VectorDBs, guardrails, memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang.
• Applying state‑of‑the‑art techniques to optimize training and inference for hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Building agentic AI systems and workflows.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills for articulating complex AI concepts.
• Architecting and integrating heterogeneous AI systems—including rule‑based, retrieval‑augmented, and generative components—into unified production pipelines.
• Defining and enforcing standards for ethical AI deployment (explainability, fairness, human‑in‑the‑loop review).
• Balancing model performance and operational cost through dynamic inference strategies and model compression.
• Right‑sizing models, instance counts, and hardware types based on requirements (e.g., context length, token inputs/outputs).

Pay

• Cambridge, MA: $229,900 – $262,400
• McLean, VA: $229,900 – $262,400
• New York, NY: $250,800 – $286,200
• San Francisco, CA: $250,800 – $286,200
• San Jose, CA: $250,800 – $286,200
• Other locations: salary range based on local market; actual offer reflected in the candidate’s offer letter.
• Eligibility for performance‑based incentive compensation (cash bonus and/or long‑term incentives).

Benefits

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial, and other benefits that support total well‑being.