Senior. Distinguished AI Engineer - Agentic AI Platform (Remote Eligible)

About the Role

At Capital One, we are creating responsible and reliable AI systems, changing banking for good. For years, Capital One has been an industry leader in using machine learning to create real-time, personalized customer experiences. Our investments in technology infrastructure and world-class talent — along with our deep experience in machine learning — position us to be at the forefront of enterprises leveraging AI.

The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team is at the center of bringing our vision for AI at Capital One to life. We work hand-in-hand with partners across the company to advance the state of the art in science and AI engineering, building and deploying proprietary solutions that deliver value to millions of customers. Our AI models and platforms empower teams to enhance their products with the transformative power of AI in responsible and scalable ways.

Responsibilities

• Partner with a cross-functional team of engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products that change how associates work and how customers interact with Capital One.
• Contribute to the north star platform architecture, continuously publishing and refining living diagrams and canonical APIs covering agent orchestration, RAG pipelines, prompt libraries, and multi-tenant policy enforcement.
• Standardize and automate agentic workflows by evaluating frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, and LlamaIndex, then hardening and blending patterns to meet enterprise SLAs, ensuring 90% of new apps adopt them.
• Enhance developer experience by contributing to an end-to-end GenAI SDK, CLI, and starter kits that enable AI engineers to spin up secure, observable agentic workflows in minutes, reducing prototyping-to-production timelines by 30%.
• Ensure trust and safety by developing central guardrail services, including prompt firewalls, content-filter hooks, red team harnesses, and audit APIs, to eliminate Sev4 incidents.
• Collaborate with cross-organization architects to optimize end-to-end performance through orchestration-level batching, retrieval caching, and heuristic tuning to reduce per-token spend.
• Accelerate innovation by incubating proof-of-concepts and driving RFCs for hierarchical agent memory, multimodal guardrails, and multimodal RAG.
• Own central Helm charts, operators, and CRDs that auto-scale agents to meet tenant SLAs.
• Coach and evangelize by hosting architecture office hours, mentoring Staff, Principal, and Senior engineers, authoring technical design documents and blogs, and representing Capital One at Tier 1 AI conferences.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or AI plus at least 10 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master's degree plus at least 8 years of experience.
• At least 10 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, or Java.

Preferred Qualifications

• 9+ years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud).
• 2+ years of experience supporting Agentic Frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or AutoGen).
• 2+ years of experience with LLMOps (Google Cloud Vertex AI, Amazon SageMaker, Azure Machine Learning).
• 8+ years of experience designing mission-critical machine learning platforms.
• 2+ years of 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 up to the VP level.
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies (e.g., LLM Inference, Similarity Search and VectorDBs, Guardrails, Memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, or Golang.
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a relevant technical field.
• Experience developing and applying state-of-the-art techniques for optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate complex AI concepts to peers.
• Experience leading GenAI or LLM-powered application architectures in production.
• Deep understanding of Responsible AI, data privacy, and multi-tenant security patterns.
• Kubernetes mastery (multi-region clusters, service mesh).
• Experience staying abreast of the latest AI research and applying novel techniques in production.

The Ideal Candidate

You love to build systems, take pride in the quality of your work, and share our passion for doing the right thing. You want to work on problems that will help change banking for good. You are passionate about staying abreast of the latest research and can intuitively understand scientific publications, applying novel techniques judiciously in production. You adapt quickly, thrive on bringing clarity to big, undefined problems, and love asking questions to uncover root causes. You have the courage to share new ideas, even when unproven, and possess a strong foundation in engineering and mathematics. Your expertise in hardware, software, and AI enables you to see optimization opportunities others miss. You are a resilient trailblazer who can forge new paths to achieve business goals.

Pay

The annual full-time salary ranges for this role are as follows:

• Remote (Regardless of Location): $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer
• Cambridge, MA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer
• McLean, VA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer
• New York, NY: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer
• San Francisco, CA: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer
• San Jose, CA: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location. This role is also eligible for performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives (LTI).

Benefits

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial, and other benefits that support your total well-being. Eligibility varies based on full or part-time status, exempt or non-exempt status, and management level. Learn more at the Capital One Careers website.