Current PhD, AI Engineering Internship Program - Summer 2027

Capital One•San Jose, CA

1d•$176,000 - $192,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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. From informing customers about unusual charges to answering their questions in real time, our applications of AI & ML are bringing deep personalization and simplicity to banking. We are committed to continuing to build world-class applied science and engineering teams to deliver our industry leading capabilities with breakthrough product experiences and scalable, high-performance AI infrastructure. At Capital One, you will help bring the transformative power of emerging AI capabilities to reimagine how we serve our customers and businesses who have come to love the products and services we build. Join the AI Engineering Internship Program for a specialized summer experience that directly contributes to delivering industry-leading agentic capabilities and scalable, high-performance AI infrastructure. As part of this team, you'll help build Agentic AI applications and platform capabilities that power customer-facing experiences with GenAI workflows, industry-leading infrastructure, and internal agentic coding tools. You'll work on the Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team, which is tasked with advancing the state-of-the-art in AI science and engineering. You’ll make valuable contributions from day one by building AI systems and shaping ideas key to delivering AI-native experiences and products for our 100mm+ customers.

Requirements

Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining a PhD in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field, with an expectation that the required degree will be obtained by August 2029 or earlier.
Must be continuing in the same course of study of the most recent degree following completion of the internship period.
At least 1 year of experience or academic work developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies.
At least 1 year of experience or academic work programming with Python, Go, Scala, or Java.

Nice To Haves

Experience or academic work with deploying AI/ML systems on cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure).
Experience or academic work in developing and applying state-of-the-art techniques for optimizing AI/ML training or inference pipelines, including distributed GPU computational frameworks.
Experience or academic work with AI/ML domains and systems (e.g., LLM Inference, Search and Retrieval, NLP, Computer Vision, Guardrails, Memory).
Familiarity with Agentic Frameworks (Eg: LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Autogen, MCP/A2A, frontier-labs agent SDKs).

Responsibilities

Partner deeply with a cross-functional team of research scientists, PMs, and engineers to prototype and ship AI-native products that reach millions of customers.
Research, prototype, and productionalize high-impact AI systems, including multimodal search, intelligent document processing, and autonomous agentic workflows that push the boundaries of current industry benchmarks.
Design and optimize the critical infrastructure of our AI stack—from fine-tuning pre-training pipelines and reinforcement learning to implementing inference optimization, robust guardrails and sophisticated evaluation frameworks.
Leverage a broad stack of technologies including AWS Ultraclusters, PyTorch, and leading-edge agentic frameworks. You’ll be empowered with top-tier developer tools like Claude Code and Windsurf to accelerate the path from concept to code.
Architect agentic workflows that go beyond simple chat—enabling AI systems to autonomously navigate tools, orchestrate multi-step reasoning, and integrate seamlessly with complex microservice environments.