AI Engineer 5 (AI Foundations, VLM Customization)
Capital One2 days ago
Cambridge, MA, USA +2 moreStaff+
Base Salary
$251k - $286k/yr
Responsibilities
- Partner with engineers, research scientists, technical program managers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products.
- Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI software components including foundation-model training, LLM inference, agents, multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, evaluation, governance, and observability.
- Develop state-of-the-art optimization techniques to improve the scalability, cost, latency, throughput, and hardware utilization of production AI systems.
- Design and optimize multi-model orchestration pipelines integrating LLMs, vector search, and domain-specific models.
- Lead cost-performance governance reviews tracking GPU utilization, model throughput, and inference-cost efficiency.
- Contribute to the technical vision and long-term roadmap of foundational AI systems.
- Lead design councils or review boards to ensure technical consistency and compliance with AI engineering standards.
- Mentor Principal- and Manager-level AI engineers and promote cross-domain technical learning.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field plus at least 6 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a master's degree in one of these fields plus at least 4 years of relevant experience.
- At least 6 years of programming experience with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.
- Experience leading AI-system development with tradeoffs involving cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy.
- Preferred experience deploying scalable and responsible AI solutions on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or equivalent private cloud, including 7 years of cloud AI experience.
- Experience designing, developing, delivering, and supporting complex AI systems.
- Experience with LLM inference, similarity search, vector databases, guardrails, memory, and AI/ML technologies using Python, C++, C#, Java, CUDA, or Golang.
- Experience optimizing training and inference software and applying state-of-the-art AI techniques.
- Experience building agentic AI systems and workflows.
- Experience architecting heterogeneous AI systems combining rule-based, retrieval-augmented, and generative components.
- Experience defining and enforcing ethical AI standards involving explainability, fairness, and human-in-the-loop review.
- Ability to balance model performance and operational cost through dynamic inference strategies and model compression.
- Experience right-sizing models, instance counts, and hardware types based on requirements such as context length and token inputs and outputs.
- Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to explain complex AI concepts.
Benefits
- Capital One offers comprehensive health, financial, and other benefits supporting total well-being, with eligibility varying by employment and management status.
- The role is eligible for performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives.
- Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
- The listed full-time annual base salary range is $229,900-$286,200 depending on location.
Categories
About Capital One
Capital One is a U.S. consumer and commercial bank that offers credit cards, checking and savings accounts, auto financing, and lending to small and large businesses. It earns revenue from interest income and interchange/fees across its card and banking products, and develops cloud-based digital services. Founded in 1994, Capital One is publicly traded on the NYSE (COF) and is headquartered in McLean, Virginia.