Capital One
Staff AI Engineer
$269K–$335K
McLean, VA +4 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Sep 23, 2026
- Location
- McLean, VA
San Francisco, CA
Cambridge, MA
San Jose, CA
New York, NY - Experience
- At least 8 years developing AI/ML algorithms or technologies with a bachelor’s degree, or at least 6 years with a master’s degree; at least 8 years programming with a listed language.
- Education
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields.
- Visa sponsorship
- Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
About the job
Build and lead foundational AI systems and AI-powered products, setting enterprise architecture direction and optimizing large-scale production models for performance, cost, and responsible use.
What you'll do
- Design, develop, deploy, and support AI components including foundation model training, LLM inference, agents, similarity search, guardrails, evaluation, governance, and observability.
- Set enterprise AI architecture standards and lead design of model routing, caching, orchestration, and optimization systems.
- Shape technical vision and roadmap, champion responsible AI, and mentor teams and share engineering practices.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 8 years developing AI/ML algorithms or technologies; or a Master’s degree in those fields plus at least 6 years of such experience.
- At least 8 years programming with Python, Go, Scala, CUDA, or Java.
Nice to have
- Experience designing AI systems with cost, latency, throughput, and accuracy tradeoffs; deploying scalable, responsible AI on cloud platforms; or architecting and supporting complex AI systems.
- Experience in AI team leadership, agentic systems, model optimization, enterprise architecture standards, or multi-cloud AI strategies.
Pay
$269,100 - $307,200 USD base salary; $293,600 - $335,100 USD base salary
Tools
AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, VectorDBs, PyTorch, Python, Go, Scala, CUDA
AI focus
Develop foundation models, LLM inference, agents and multi-agent workflows, similarity search, guardrails, evaluation, and optimization for scalable, responsible production AI systems.
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