Senior Lead AI Engineer; LLM Customization and Finetuning

Overview

Capital One is creating responsible and reliable AI systems and applying machine learning to personalize customer experiences. Our investments in technology infrastructure and talent position us at the forefront of applying AI and ML in banking. We aim to deliver breakthrough product experiences and scalable, high-performance AI infrastructure that reimagines how we serve customers and businesses.

The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team collaborates with partners across the company to advance AI engineering and deploy proprietary solutions that deliver value to millions of customers. Our AI models and platforms enable teams to incorporate AI in responsible, scalable ways for high leverage impact.

• Partner with a cross-functional team of engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products that change how our associates work and how customers interact with Capital One.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components including foundation model training, large language model inference, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Leverage a broad stack of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultra clusters, Huggingface, Vector
  
  DBs, Nemo Guardrails, PyTorch, and more.
• Invent and introduce state-of-the-art LLM optimization techniques to improve performance—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.

• You love building systems, take pride in the quality of your work, and want to help change banking for good.
• You stay current with the latest research and can judiciously apply novel techniques in production.
• You adapt quickly, bring clarity to big problems, ask questions, dig deep to find root causes, and articulate findings concisely; you share new ideas even when unproven.
• You are deeply technical, with a strong engineering and mathematical foundation, and leverage hardware, software, and AI knowledge to find optimization opportunities.
• You are a resilient trail blazer who can forge new paths to achieve business goals when the route is unknown.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields with at least 6 years of AI/ML experience, or a Master’s degree with at least 4 years of AI/ML experience.
• At least 6 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, or Java.

• 7 years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud).
• Experience designing, developing, integrating, delivering, and supporting complex AI systems.
• Proven ability to lead and mentor an engineering team and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Experience developing AI/ML algorithms, such as LLM inference, similarity search and vector databases, guardrails, and memory, using Python, C++, C#, Java, or Go.
• Experience optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Strong interest in staying current with AI research and applying novel techniques in production.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills to articulate complex AI concepts to peers.

Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.

The minimum and maximum full-time annual salaries for this role are listed below by location. Salaries are for candidates hired to work in particular locations and may be reflected in the offer letter. Part-time salaries will be prorated.

McLean, VA: $229,900 - $262,400 for Sr. Lead AI Engineer;
Cambridge, MA: $229,900 - $262,400;
New York, NY: $250,800 - $286,200;
San Jose, CA: $250,800 - $286,200.

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be paid according to that location’s range. This role may be eligible for performance-based incentives including cash bonuses or long-term…