Staff Software Engineer - Machine Learning

About this role

We’re on a mission to transform the way we use data and AI to service our customers and drive efficiency across the business. Do you love shaping the technical landscape and driving innovation across the organisation? Are you passionate about solving complex ML and AI challenges and supporting multiple teams toward a shared technical vision? At Capital One, you'll be part of a community of technical leaders who drive engineering excellence, foster innovation, and deliver impactful ML/AI and Gen AI solutions that meet real customer needs.

What You'll Do

• Own and drive the ML/AI technical strategy for UK use cases, spanning multiple teams and influencing the overall technical direction for AI adoption.
• Lead and coordinate ML engineering efforts across multiple teams, ensuring alignment with broader business objectives, enterprise platform capabilities, and technology strategy.
• Provide technical consultancy to teams delivering AI use cases, guiding architectural decisions, solution design, and effective use of enterprise ML/AI platforms and capabilities.
• Proactively identify emerging ML/AI patterns, define and evangelise best practices, and establish reusable approaches that enhance delivery of AI use cases across the business.
• Drive MLOps standards and practices across teams, including CI/CD for models, automated testing, monitoring, and deployment pipelines.
• Collaborate with enterprise platform and data science teams, contributing to platform capabilities where appropriate and partnering on use case delivery.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders, including senior leadership, product owners, data science teams, and enterprise platform partners.
• Represent Capital One in external ML/AI technical forums, contributing to industry discussions.
• Develop and advocate for strategies to proactively manage technical debt across ML/AI systems.
• Actively mentor and develop engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning.

What we're looking for

• Deep expertise in Python and ML engineering.
• Deep expertise in ML/AI systems design, MLOps, and cloud-native architectures.
• Track record of leading ML/AI technical initiatives across multiple teams.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn) and Gen AI/Agentic frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain, VectorDBs, RAG).
• Understanding of responsible AI practices, including guardrails, hallucination mitigation, and output quality management for AI systems.
• Experience designing and scaling low-latency, customer-facing ML/AI architectures.
• Proven experience setting a multi-team ML/AI technical vision and strategy.
• Strong track record of technical leadership and influence without authority.
• Experience driving ML engineering standards and best practices across organisations.
• Deep understanding of the full ML/AI development lifecycle, including model serving, data pipelines, and Gen AI systems.
• Experience leveraging enterprise platforms to deliver business use cases at scale.
• Experience of steering Communities of Practice or technical forums.
• Strong business acumen and ability to translate ML/AI concepts for various audiences.

Where and how you'll work

This is a permanent position based in our London office. We have a hybrid working model which gives you flexibility to work from our office and from home. We're big on collaboration and connection, so you'll be based in our London office 3 days a week on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

What's in it for you

Bring us all this - and you'll be well rewarded with a role contributing to the roadmap of an organisation committed to transformation. We offer high performers strong and diverse career progression, investing heavily in developing great people through our Capital One University training programmes (and appropriate external providers). Immediate access to our core benefits including pension scheme, bonus, generous holiday entitlement and private medical insurance - with flexible benefits available including season-ticket loans, cycle to work scheme and enhanced parental leave. Open-plan workspaces and accessible facilities designed to inspire and support you. Our Nottingham head-office has a fully-serviced gym, subsidised restaurant, mindfulness and music rooms.

What you should know about how we recruit

We pride ourselves on hiring the best people, not the same people. Building diverse and inclusive teams is the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. We want to work with top talent: whoever you are, whatever you look like, wherever you come from. We know it's about what you do, not just what you say. That's why we make our recruitment process fair and accessible. And we offer benefits that attract people at all ages and stages. We also partner with organisations including the Women in Finance and Race At Work Charters, Stonewall and upReach to find people from every walk of life and help them thrive with us. We have a whole host of internal networks and support groups you could be involved in.