Distinguished Engineer
As a Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, you will be a part of a community of technical experts working to define the future of banking in the cloud.
You will work alongside our talented team of developers, machine learning experts, product managers and people leaders. Our Distinguished Engineers are leading experts in their domains, helping devise practical and reusable solutions to complex problems. You will drive innovation at multiple levels, helping optimize business outcomes while driving towards strong technology solutions.
At Capital One, we believe diversity of thought strengthens our ability to influence, collaborate and provide the most innovative solutions across organizational boundaries. You will promote a culture of engineering excellence, and strike the right balance between lending expertise and providing an inclusive environment where the ideas of others can be heard and championed. You will lead the way in creating next-generation talent for Capital One Tech, mentoring internal talent and actively recruiting to keep building our community.
Distinguished Engineers are expected to lead through technical contribution. You will operate as a trusted advisor for our key technologies, platforms and capability domains, creating clear and concise communications, code samples, blog posts and other material to share knowledge both inside and outside the organization. You will specialize in a particular subject area, but your input and impact will be sought and expected throughout the organization.
We are looking for a visionary technologist to anchor our Foundation Model (FM) Hosting team. As generative AI becomes the core engine of our business, the frontier of our success lies in how efficiently, reliably, and rapidly we can serve massive large language models at scale.
In this Distinguished-level role, you won't just be using existing tools; you will be pushing the absolute limits of LLM inference physics. You will own the technical strategy for our FM serving stack, bridging the critical gap between our Science teams and our production infrastructure. If you thrive on shaving off milliseconds of latency, writing custom CUDA kernels to bypass hardware bottlenecks, and architecting distributed systems that scale effortlessly on Kubernetes, we want you to lead our next generation of AI infrastructure.
If you are ready to provide thought leadership and build engineering excellence across Capital One's engineering teams, come join us in our mission to change banking for good.
Key responsibilities:
- Articulate and evangelize a bold technical vision for your domain
- Decompose complex problems into practical and operational solutions
- Ensure the quality of technical design and implementation
- Serve as an authoritative expert on non-functional system characteristics, such as performance, scalability and operability
- Continue learning and injecting advanced technical knowledge into our community
- Handle several projects simultaneously, balancing your time to maximize impact
- Act as a role model and mentor within the tech community, helping to coach and strengthen the technical expertise and know-how of our engineering and product community
- Design and drive the long-term technical roadmap for our Foundation Model Hosting platform, ensuring high throughput, ultra-low latency, and optimal GPU utilization across massive, multi-tenant workloads.
- Lead performance engineering across both the platform and model layers. You will pioneer the implementation of advanced techniques such as speculative decoding, continuous batching, kv-cache optimization (PagedAttention), and custom quantization strategies (FP8, INT4, AWQ).
- Act as the primary engineering counterpart to our AI Research & Science teams. You will co-design model architectures for deployability, ensuring that the latest foundational models seamlessly transition from the lab to highly optimized production environments.
- Mentor senior engineers, establish rigorous engineering standards for AI deployment, and foster a culture of uncompromising technical excellence.
Basic Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s Degree
- At least 7 years of experience in Software engineering
Preferred Qualifications:
- Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related field
- 10+ years of experience coding in commonly used languages like Java, Python, Go, JavaScript or TypeScript and Swift.
- 9+ years of experience in the full lifecycle of system development, from conception through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment and production support
- 3+ years of experience with public or private cloud technologies
- 8+ years of experience with Networking (BGP, Wi-Fi, SD-WAN, Cloud Networking and Data Center Networking)
- Contributions, active maintainer status, or core authorship in open-source AI infrastructure or serving projects (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, Hugging Face TGI, Ray, or Triton Inference Server).
- Experience in distributed inference communication primitives. Experience optimizing NCCL, heavily utilizing NVLink/NVSwitch, and tuning network fabrics such as InfiniBand/RDMA for complex Tensor Parallelism (TP) and Pipeline Parallelism (PP) architectures.
- Published research or papers at top-tier Machine Learning and Systems conferences such as MLSys, OSDI, SOSP, NeurIPS, or ICML, or hold patents related to distributed systems, model compression, or AI inference scaling.
- Experience designing routing and scheduling mechanisms for split-architecture serving or multi-LoRA serving architectures to support thousands of dynamic, personalized model adapters simultaneously.
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.
Sales Territory: $244,700 - $279,200 for Distinguished Engineer
McLean, VA: $269,100 - $307,200 for Distinguished Engineer
New York, NY: $293,600 - $335,100 for Distinguished Engineer
San Francisco, CA: $293,600 - $335,100 for Distinguished 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
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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).