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About This Role
Lead AI Engineer (AI Foundations, LLM Core and Agentic AI)Overview
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 humanity 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.
Team Description:
The Intelligent Foundations and Experiences (IFX) team is at the center of bringing our vision for AI at Capital One to life. We work hand\-in\-hand with our partners across the company to advance the state of the art in science and AI engineering, and we build and deploy proprietary solutions that are central to our business and deliver value to millions of customers. Our AI models and platforms empower teams across Capital One to enhance their products with the transformative power of AI, in responsible and scalable ways for the highest leverage impact.
In this role, you will:
- 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 our 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, etc.
- Leverage a broad stack of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, Nemo Guardrails, PyTorch, and more.
- Invent and introduce state\-of\-the\-art LLM optimization techniques to improve the performance — scalability, cost, latency, throughput — of large scale production AI systems.
- Contribute to the technical vision and the long term roadmap of foundational AI systems at Capital One.
The Ideal Candidate:
- You love to build systems, take pride in the quality of your work, and also share our passion to do the right thing. You want to work on problems that will help change banking for good.
- Passion for staying abreast of the latest research, and an ability to intuitively understand scientific publications and judiciously apply novel techniques in production.
- You adapt quickly and thrive on bringing clarity to big, undefined problems. You love asking questions and digging deep to uncover the root of problems and can articulate your findings concisely with clarity. You have the courage to share new ideas even when they are unproven.
- You are deeply Technical. You possess a strong foundation in engineering and mathematics, and your expertise in hardware, software, and AI enable you to see and exploit optimization opportunities that others miss.
- You are a resilient trail blazer who can forge new paths to achieve business goals when the route is unknown.
Basic Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 4 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 2 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies
- At least 4 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, or Java
Preferred Qualifications:
- 6 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, delivering, and supporting AI services
- Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies (e.g. LLM Inference, Similarity Search and VectorDBs, Guardrails, Memory) using Python, C\+\+, C\#, Java, or Golang
- Experience developing and applying state\-of\-the\-art techniques for optimizing training and inference software to improve hardware utilization, latency, throughput, and cost
- Passion for staying abreast of the latest AI research and AI systems, and judiciously apply novel techniques in production
*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. Please note that this salary information is solely for candidates hired to perform work within one of these locations, and refers to the amount Capital One is willing to pay at the time of this posting. Salaries for part\-time roles will be prorated based upon the agreed upon number of hours to be regularly worked.
Cambridge, MA: $197,300 \- $225,100 for Lead AI Engineer
McLean, VA: $197,300 \- $225,100 for Lead AI Engineer
New York, NY: $215,200 \- $245,600 for Lead AI Engineer
San Francisco, CA: $215,200 \- $245,600 for Lead AI Engineer
San Jose, CA: $215,200 \- $245,600 for Lead AI Engineer
Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location, and the actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate’s offer letter.
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.
This role is expected to accept applications for a minimum of 5 business days.
No agencies please. Capital One is an equal opportunity employer (EOE, including disability/vet) committed to non\-discrimination in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Capital One promotes a drug\-free workplace. Capital One will consider for employment qualified applicants with a criminal history in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable laws regarding criminal background inquiries, including, to the extent applicable, Article 23\-A of the New York Correction Law; San Francisco, California Police Code Article 49, Sections 4901\-4920; New York City’s Fair Chance Act; Philadelphia’s Fair Criminal Records Screening Act; and other applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations regarding criminal background inquiries.
If you have visited our website in search of information on employment opportunities or to apply for a position, and you require an accommodation, please contact Capital One Recruiting at 1\-800\-304\-9102 or via email at RecruitingAccommodation@capitalone.com. All information you provide will be kept confidential and will be used only to the extent required to provide needed reasonable accommodations.
For technical support or questions about Capital One's recruiting process, please send an email to Careers@capitalone.com
Capital One does not provide, endorse nor guarantee and is not liable for third\-party products, services, educational tools or other information available through this site.
Capital One Financial is made up of several different entities. Please note that any position posted in Canada is for Capital One Canada, any position posted in the United Kingdom is for Capital One Europe and any position posted in the Philippines is for Capital One Philippines Service Corp. (COPSSC).
Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 26,159 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At Capital One, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $166,983 based on 13,781 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Architect ($292,900). By seniority level: Entry: $76,880; Mid: $131,300; Senior: $227,400; Director: $244,288; VP: $234,620.
Capital One AI Hiring
Capital One has 48 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, Data Scientist, Data Engineer, MLOps Engineer. Positions span McLean, VA, US, New York, NY, US, San Jose, CA, US.
Location Context
AI roles in New York pay a median of $200,000 across 1,670 tracked positions. That's 9% above the national median.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 26,159 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 2,416 entry-level, 16,247 mid-level, 5,153 senior, and 2,343 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 7% of the market (1,863 positions). The remaining 24,200 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 28 roles); AI Architect ($292,900 median, 108 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 19 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 26,159 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (23,752), AI Software Engineer (598), AI Product Manager (594). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (2,416) are outnumbered by mid-level (16,247) and senior (5,153) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 2,343 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 7% of all AI roles (1,863 positions), with 24,200 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $184,000. Top-quartile roles start at $244,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $309,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $122,200. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Rag (16,749 postings), Aws (8,932 postings), Rust (7,660 postings), Python (3,815 postings), Azure (2,678 postings), Gcp (2,247 postings), Prompt Engineering (1,469 postings), Openai (1,269 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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