[Hiring] Director, AI Engineering @Capital One

Role Description

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.

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.

What You’ll Do:

• 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.
• Oversee the design, development, testing, deployment, and support AI software components including foundation model training, large language model inference, similarity search, guardrails, model evaluation, experimentation, governance, and observability.
• Make high judgment build-vs-buy decisions across a broad stack of Open Source and SaaS AI technologies such as AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch, and more.
• Invent and introduce state-of-the-art foundation model 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.
• Attract and retain top talent in the AI industry and nurture personal and professional development for your team. Foster a culture of learning and staying abreast of the state-of-the-art in AI.
• Translate the enterprise AI strategy into portfolio-level execution plans across multiple product areas, balancing innovation with delivery discipline.
• Scale AI engineering practices across teams through shared infrastructure, reusable components, and unified observability and governance frameworks.
• Establish enterprise standard for Responsible AI, including fairness metrics, model evaluation protocols, documentation requirements, and audit readiness.
• Partner with research, compliance, and enterprise risk teams to ensure deployed systems meet emerging ethical and regulatory standards.

Qualifications

• You love to build systems, take pride in the quality of your work, and also share our passion to do the right thing.
• Passion for staying abreast of the latest research, and an ability to intuitively understand scientific publications and judiciously apply novel techniques in production.
• You get fulfillment from empowering others to achieve their potential and you actively drive professional development through mentoring and coaching.
• You adapt quickly and thrive on bringing clarity to big, undefined problems.
• You are deeply Technical with a strong foundation in engineering and mathematics.
• You are a resilient trailblazer who can forge new paths to achieve business goals when the route is unknown.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 8 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master's degree in the same fields plus at least 6 years of experience.
• At least 3 years of people leadership experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience managing and leading an engineering team.
• 7+ years of experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud).
• Experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies (e.g. LLM Inference, Similarity Search and VectorDBs, Guardrails, Memory) using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang.
• Experience in building agentic AI systems and agentic workflows.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate complex AI concepts to peers.
• Experience building and leading multi-team AI organization delivering multiple enterprise products or capabilities concurrently.
• Proven ability to expand and execute long-term AI platform strategies aligned to enterprise priorities and regulatory frameworks.
• Experience establishing cross-functional operating rhythms and review cadences (OKRs, AI governance councils, quarterly reviews).
• Experience right-sizing models, instance counts, and hardware types given requirements (e.g., context length, token inputs, token outputs).

Salary Information

• Remote (Regardless of Location): $244,700 - $279,200 for Director, AI Engineer
• McLean, VA: $269,100 - $307,200 for Director, AI Engineer
• New York, NY: $293,600 - $335,100 for Director, AI Engineer
• San Francisco, CA: $293,600 - $335,100 for Director, AI Engineer

Benefits

• Comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well-being.