Senior Lead Software Engineer, Back-End Distributed Systems (AWS, Go, Kubernetes, MCP, Lua, Python)

Overview

Senior Distinguished Engineer, AI Compute (Remote Eligible)

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 Capital One machine learning platform organization manages our cloud-based enterprise AI+ML system delivering the high-scale developer and runtime environments required to build, orchestrate, and deploy compute and data intensive AI systems across real-time and batch workloads. We are seeking a Senior Distinguished Engineer, a hands-on technical leader passionate about distributed systems, to engineer and scale foundational compute capabilities for our platform.

You will use your experience in building large scale, highly available and high performance systems to develop our common compute infrastructure on top of CPU and GPU substrates. Your contributions will power everything from developer notebooks to ML / DL model training, model inference and feature generation pipelines to pre-training and fine tuning Transformer-based models as well as generative AI inference and agentic applications. Your depth of expertise in technologies including Golang and Python programming languages, popular distributed compute frameworks including Spark / Dask / Ray / Flink, container (e.g., Kubernetes) and serverless (e.g., AWS Lambda) runtime environments, and ML+AI workload patterns will provide an amplifying technical element that is paramount to our team's success.

In this role, you will :

• Architect and build control and data plane implementations required to realize a highly available, multi-tenant, large scale and a secure machine learning platform

• Develop Ray and Spark distributed compute engine solutions to accelerate diverse workloads from LLM pre-training and reinforcement learning to large-scale data processing, while maximizing compute unit economics

• Engineer systemic improvements for operational excellence including automating KTLO (Keep The Lights On) workflows

• Direct the technical execution of a diverse project portfolio, collaborating with developers specializing in everything ranging from distributed microservices to running large foundation models

• Work cross-functionally with product and program management disciplines, and stakeholder and partners across Capital One to help optimize business outcomes while driving towards strong technology solutions

• Share your passion for staying on top of tech trends, experimenting with and learning new technologies, participating in internal & external technology communities, and leading system design and code review sessions

• Help elevate the Capital One Distinguished Engineering community and establish yourself as a go-to resource on given technologies and technology-enabled capabilities

• Lead the way in creating next-generation talent, mentoring internal talent and actively recruiting external talent to bolster the Capital One tech talent pool

Capital One is open to hiring a Remote Employee for this opportunity

Basic Qualifications: 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 10 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, or a Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 8 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies

• At least 10 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, or Java

Preferred Qualifications :

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or a Master’s Degree in Software Engineering

• Hands on experience in the internals of Ray (Actors/GCS/Scheduling) or Spark (Query Optimizer/Memory Management)

• Experience  building platforms that support LLM training, fine-tuning, or high-throughput inference

• Hands-on experience with AWS-specific compute primitives (EKS, EC2 UltraClusters, Graviton) and cost-optimization strategies

• History of upstream contributions to major distributed systems projects

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.

Remote (Regardless of Location): $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer

Cambridge, MA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer

McLean, VA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer

New York, NY: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer

Richmond, VA: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer

San Francisco, CA: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Distinguished AI Engineer

San Jose, CA: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Distinguished AI 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.

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For technical support or questions about Capital One's recruiting process, please send an email to View email address on capitalonecareers.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).