Director, AI Engineering

Director, AI Engineering

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.

About the Team

This team owns the infrastructure layer between applications and foundation models: model access, routing, reliability, security integration, observability, and cost management behind a single governed interface. Product teams build on the platform instead of integrating with model providers directly, which means the enterprise adopts new model capability once, centrally, rather than many times over. Sitting in the request path for every AI-powered application makes latency, reliability, and efficiency company-level outcomes rather than local ones.

This team also owns a measurement and attribution layer that makes consumption legible to the optimization capabilities that act on it, including intelligent routing, caching, context optimization, and capacity planning. The objective is cost per unit of business outcome, not spend reduction in isolation. The architecture set now will determine the enterprise’s cost curve and build velocity for years, and this role owns both those decisions and the teams that execute them.

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
• 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, etc.
• Make high judgment build-vs-buy decisions across 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
• 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

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 get fulfillment from empowering others to achieve their potential and you actively drive professional development through mentoring and coaching. You are hands-on when necessary and lead by example
• You adapt quickly and thrive on bri…