Lead Software Engineer (Python, Vector Databases, AWS)

About the role

Do you love building and pioneering in the technology space? Do you enjoy solving complex business problems in a fast-paced, collaborative, inclusive, and iterative delivery environment? At Capital One, you'll be part of a big group of makers, breakers, doers and disruptors, who solve real problems and meet real customer needs.

We are seeking Full Stack Software Engineers who are passionate about marrying data with emerging technologies. As a Capital One Senior Lead Software Engineer, you’ll have the opportunity to be on the forefront of driving a major transformation within Capital One.

Responsibilities

As a Lead Software Engineer, you will build the data infrastructure layer that powers Capital One's AI-driven content management capabilities. You will own the Content Hub — our vector and graph database platform for semantic content retrieval — including the embedding pipelines, knowledge graph schema, and indexing infrastructure that enable AI models to retrieve the right content, rules, and context at generation time.

• Design and build the Content Hub - vector database and graph database infrastructure for semantic retrieval.
• Own the indexing pipeline, query layer, and integration with AI content generation platform.
• Build and operate embedding pipelines, generate embeddings, manage chunking strategies, and handle index refresh as content evolves.
• Own embedding model selection and refresh strategy — evaluate tradeoffs between embedding model quality and operational cost; design refresh pipelines that keep the index current as the underlying content corpora changes.
• Lead a portfolio of diverse technology projects and a team of developers with deep experience in distributed microservices, and full stack systems to create solutions that help meet regulatory needs for the company.
• Share your passion for staying on top of tech trends, experimenting with and learning new technologies, participating in internal & external technology communities, mentoring other members of the engineering community, and from time to time, be asked to code or evaluate code.
• Collaborate with digital product managers, and deliver robust cloud-based solutions that drive powerful experiences to help millions of Americans achieve financial empowerment.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree.
• At least 4 years of experience in software engineering (Internship experience does not apply).
• At least 1 year experience with cloud computing (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with data infrastructure, search systems, or AI/ML engineering.
• Experience working with vector databases or embedding-based search.
• Experience working with data pipeline engineering — ingestion, transformation, chunking, and indexing at scale; familiarity with batch and streaming pipeline patterns.
• Experience with Python for data pipeline and backend service development.
• Experience with RAG architecture.
• 2+ years of experience in Agile practices.
• Experience leveraging interactive AI tooling to accelerate productivity, utilizing capabilities beyond basic code completion.

Pay

The minimum and maximum full-time annual salaries for this role are: McLean, VA: $197,300 - $225,100 for Lead Software Engineer, Richmond, VA: $179,400 - $204,700 for Lead Software Engineer. Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location.

This role is also eligible to earn performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI).