Senior Lead Software Engineer, Full Stack (AI Platform & Knowledge Library) (Enterprise Platforms Technology)
What You'll Do
Design and build the Content Moderation Knowledge Library — a business-unit-scoped, RAG-backed corpus covering regulatory requirements, brand rules, claims and disclosures, and marketing context, reusable across channels and product lines
Own the embedding search pipeline — implement and tune retrieval pipelines for grounded AI generation, including chunking strategy, embedding model selection, index refresh, and hybrid search
Lead Prompt MLOps — treat prompts as compiled, versioned artifacts; own the evaluation loop that continuously improves generation quality against labeled production data
Own the AI content compliance and generation platform APIs as shared capabilities across multiple engineering teams — define contracts, manage versioning, and coordinate cross-team integrations
Design the agentic critic validation stream — deterministic parallel validators (sensitive data detection, compliance rules, claims mapping) combined with LLM-as-judge semantic validators (brand voice, coherence, substantiation)
Lead technical design, produce architecture documents, conduct design reviews, and mentor engineers on RAG system design, eval methodology, and production AI operations
Basic Qualifications:
Bachelor’s Degree
At least 6 years of experience in software engineering (Internship experience does not apply)
At least 1 year experience with cloud computing (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)
Preferred Qualifications:
Master’s Degree
4+ years of experience in Python
4+ years of experience building and operating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems
3 + years of experience in applied AI/ML or LLM-based systems in production.
3+ years of experience with vector search infrastructure (OpenSearch, Pinecone, PGvector, Weaviate, or equivalent)
3+ years of experience designing and owning shared platform APIs
2+ years of experience with AWS services (OpenSearch Service, S3, Lambda, SQS, or equivalent)
Experience leveraging interactive AI tooling to accelerate productivity, utilizing capabilities beyond basic code completion
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.
McLean, VA: $229,900 - $262,400 for Sr. Lead Software EngineerNew York, NY: $250,800 - $286,200 for Sr. Lead Software Engineer
Richmond, VA: $209,000 - $238,500 for Sr. Lead Software 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.
