AI Engineer 4 (AI Foundations)

Capital One • San Jose, CA

1d

About The Position

Capital One is hiring an AI Engineer 4 for its Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team. The team partners across the company to advance AI science and engineering and to build and deploy proprietary solutions that support Capital One products and serve millions of customers. Its AI models and platforms help teams deliver responsible, scalable AI capabilities.

In this role, you will work with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products. You will build and support foundational AI systems and components, apply and optimize emerging AI techniques for production, and contribute to the technical vision and roadmap for AI systems at Capital One. The role includes end-to-end architecture ownership, reliability objectives, infrastructure optimization, deployment reviews, and mentoring.

The position is eligible for performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives. Capital One states that it will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization. The role is expected to accept applications for at least five business days.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field and at least 4 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies; alternatively, a master's degree in one of these fields and at least 2 years of such experience.
• At least 4 years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading AI system development and making tradeoff decisions involving cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
• 6 years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud.
• Experience designing, developing, delivering, and supporting AI services.
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, such as LLM inference, similarity search and VectorDBs, guardrails, and memory, using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang.
• Experience developing and applying state-of-the-art techniques to optimize training and inference software for hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Experience building agentic AI systems and workflows.
• Interest in keeping abreast of AI research and systems and applying novel techniques in production.
• Proficiency designing distributed systems for model training, evaluation, and online inference at petabyte scale.
• Experience defining AI model governance processes, including producibility, lineage tracking, and automated retraining schedules.
• Demonstrated ability to influence architectural decisions across multiple AI product lines or platforms.

Responsibilities

• Partner with cross-functional engineering, research, program management, and product teams to deliver AI-powered products for associates and customers.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components, including foundation model training, LLM inference, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Use open-source and SaaS AI technologies, including AWS Ultraclusters, Hugging Face, VectorDBs, and PyTorch.
• Develop and introduce foundation-model optimization techniques to improve scalability, cost, latency, and throughput in large-scale production AI systems.
• Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems at Capital One.
• Own end-to-end architecture for complex AI systems, ensuring maintainability, observability, and ethical alignment.
• Define and maintain service-level objectives for AI reliability, including latency, uptime, and model-performance drift.
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineering to optimize GPU/TPU utilization and accelerate model-inference pipelines.
• Lead cross-functional technical reviews for new AI system deployments, ensuring security, data governance, and compliance standards are met.
• Mentor Principal and Senior Associates in scalable design, performance tuning, and translating research into production.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, financial, and other benefits supporting total well-being.
• Performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior