AI Engineer, AI Foundations & VLM Customization

Salary: $197,300 - 245,600 per year Requirements: We need a bachelors degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field with at least 4 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a masters degree in one of those fields with at least 2 years of such experience. We need at least 4 years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java. Preferred: experience leading AI system development with tradeoff decisions across cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy. Preferred: 6 years of experience delivering scalable, responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud. Preferred: experience designing, developing, delivering, and supporting AI services. Preferred: experience building AI and ML capabilities such as LLM inference, similarity search, vector databases, guardrails, and memory using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang. Preferred: experience applying advanced techniques to optimize training and inference software for better hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost. Preferred: experience building agentic AI systems and multi-agent workflows. Preferred: strong familiarity with current AI research and the ability to apply novel methods in production. Preferred: experience designing distributed systems for model training, evaluation, and online inference at petabyte scale. Preferred: experience defining AI governance processes, including reproducibility, lineage tracking, and automated retraining schedules. Preferred: demonstrated ability to influence architectural decisions across multiple AI product lines or platforms. Responsibilities: We partner with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products that improve how our associates work and how our customers interact with Capital One. We design, build, test, deploy, and support AI software components, including foundation model training, large language model inference, agents, multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability. We use open-source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Hugging Face, VectorDBs, PyTorch, and related tools. We invent and apply foundation model optimization methods to improve scalability, cost, latency, and throughput in large-scale production AI systems. We help shape the technical direction and long-term roadmap for foundational AI systems. We own end-to-end architecture for complex AI systems, with attention to maintainability, observability, and ethical alignment. We define and maintain service-level objectives for AI reliability, including latency, uptime, and model performance drift. We work with infrastructure engineering to improve GPU and TPU utilization and speed up model inference pipelines. We lead cross-functional technical reviews for new AI deployments, ensuring security, data governance, and compliance standards are met. We mentor Principal and Senior Associates on scalable design, performance tuning, and translating research into production. Technologies: Agentic AI AI AWS Azure C# Cloud CUDA Golang Hardware Support Java LLM Model Training PyTorch Python Scala Security Machine Learning More: We are Capital One, building responsible and reliable AI systems to help change banking for good. Our Intelligent Foundations and Experiences team sits at the center of our AI vision, working closely with partners across the company to advance science and AI engineering and to build proprietary solutions that deliver value to millions of customers. We invest in world-class technology, scalable AI infrastructure, and high-performing teams, and this role is based in locations including Cambridge, McLean, New York, and San Jose, with compensation ranges that vary by location. The position may also be eligible for performance-based incentives and a comprehensive benefits package, and we support a broad, inclusive set of health, financial, and wellbeing benefits. last updated 38 week of 2026