Lead Machine Learning Engineer
Capital One · McLean, VA
$197,300–$225,100from the description
Jul 24, 2026
McLean, VA
Jul 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual contributor role focused on building, deploying, and maintaining machine learning models and pipelines at scale within a banking data and decisioning platform. Day-to-day work spans ML architecture design, writing and reviewing model and application code, constructing cloud-based data pipelines, and governing models in production. Suits engineers with substantial experience in distributed computing, ML frameworks, and production ML systems.
Senior level · 6+ years · Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV · Bachelor's required · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,250 people in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 930–1,600
Applicant volume Heavy — This req sits in a large pool with little in its requirements to thin it, and auto-apply tools fire at everything in the occupation. Applying early and leading with the rare skills below is what gets read.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $135,107 (middle half $108,024–$176,763). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The title is 'Lead Machine Learning Engineer' with no explicit seniority level word (e.g. Senior, Staff); 'Lead' here is used as a role descriptor rather than a career-ladder level, so advertised seniority is set to Unspecified. The 6-year distributed computing gate and 2-year ML systems gate support a Senior classification.
The role sits between Data Scientists (15-2051) and Software Developers (15-1252): it emphasizes productionizing ML models, building ML infrastructure, and writing application code at scale. 15-2051 was chosen as primary given the explicit ML modeling scope (feature selection, hyperparameter tuning, bias/variance, model governance), with 15-1252 as a close runner-up given the heavy software engineering and deployment emphasis.
The salary range ($197,300–$225,100) is explicitly stated for the McLean, VA location only; candidates in other locations will have a different pay range per the posting.
People-leader experience (2+ years) and team-leading ML experience (1+ years) are listed under Preferred Qualifications. These are soft/organizational skills rather than named technologies and are therefore not emitted as skills.
The posting explicitly states Capital One will not sponsor work authorization for this position.
Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, GCP) appears under Preferred Qualifications and is marked accordingly.
Read the full posting
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