Lead Machine Learning Engineer (MLOps, KServe + building Kubernetes Clusters, PyTorch, TensorFlow on AWS)

About the Role

As a Capital One Machine Learning Engineer (MLE), you'll be part of an Agile team dedicated to productionizing machine learning applications and systems at scale. You'll participate in the detailed technical design, development, and implementation of machine learning applications using existing and emerging technology platforms. You'll focus on machine learning architectural design, develop and review model and application code, and ensure high availability and performance of our machine learning applications. You'll have the opportunity to continuously learn and apply the latest innovations and best practices in machine learning engineering.

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.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and/or deliver ML models and components that solve real‑world business problems, while working in collaboration with the Product and Data Science teams.
• Inform your ML infrastructure decisions using your understanding of ML modeling techniques and issues, including choice of model, data, and feature selection, model training, hyperparameter tuning, dimensionality, bias/variance, and validation.
• Solve complex problems by writing and testing application code, developing and validating ML models, and automating tests and deployment.
• Collaborate as part of a cross‑functional Agile team to create and enhance software that enables state‑of‑the‑art big data and ML applications.
• Retrain, maintain, and monitor models in production.
• Leverage or build cloud‑based architectures, technologies, and/or platforms to deliver optimized ML models at scale.
• Construct optimized data pipelines to feed ML models.
• Leverage continuous integration and continuous deployment best practices, including test automation and monitoring, to ensure successful deployment of ML models and application code.
• Ensure all code is well‑managed to reduce vulnerabilities, models are well‑governed from a risk perspective, and the ML follows best practices in Responsible and Explainable AI.
• Use programming languages like Python, Scala, or Java.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree
• At least 6 years of experience designing and building data‑intensive solutions using distributed computing (Internship experience does not apply)
• At least 4 years of experience programming with Python, Scala, or Java
• At least 2 years of experience building, scaling, and optimizing ML systems

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's or doctoral degree in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, or a similar field
• 3+ years of experience building production‑ready data pipelines that feed ML models
• 3+ years of on‑the‑job experience with an industry recognized ML framework such as scikit‑learn, PyTorch, Dask, Spark, or TensorFlow
• 2+ years of experience developing performant, resilient, and maintainable code
• 2+ years of experience with data gathering and preparation for ML models
• 2+ years of people leader experience
• 1+ years of experience leading teams developing ML solutions using industry best practices, patterns, and automation
• Experience developing and deploying ML solutions in a public cloud such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform
• Experience designing, implementing, and scaling complex data pipelines for ML models and evaluating their performance
• ML industry impact through conference presentations, papers, blog posts, open source contributions, or patents

Benefits

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well‑being. Eligibility varies based on full or part‑time status, exempt or non‑exempt status, and management level.

Salary Range

• Cambridge, MA: $197,300 – $225,100 for Lead Machine Learning Engineer
• McLean, VA: $197,300 – $225,100 for Lead Machine Learning Engineer
• New York, NY: $215,200 – $245,600 for Lead Machine Learning Engineer
• Richmond, VA: $179,400 – $204,700 for Lead Machine Learning Engineer
• San Jose, CA: $215,200 – $245,600 for Lead Machine Learning Engineer

This role is also eligible to earn performance‑based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long‑term incentives (LTI).