Lead Software Engineer (Python, Vector Databases, AWS)

Capital One • McLean, VA

1d • $179,400 - $225,100 • Onsite

About The Position

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. 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.

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)

Nice To Haves

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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
• Utilize programming languages like JavaScript, Java, HTML/CSS, TypeScript, SQL, Python, and Go, Open Source RDBMS and NoSQL databases, Container Orchestration services including Docker and Kubernetes, and a variety of AWS tools and services

Benefits

• This role is also eligible to earn performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI). Incentives could be discretionary or non discretionary depending on the plan.
• Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well-being. Learn more at the Capital One Careers website. Eligibility varies based on full or part-time status, exempt or non-exempt status, and management level.

What This Job Offers

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