Applied Researcher I (AI Foundations, LLM Customization, Finetuning, Reinforcement Learning)

About the role

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. The AI Foundations team is at the center of bringing our vision for AI at Capital One to life. Our work touches every aspect of the research life cycle, from partnering with academia to building production systems. We work with product, technology, and business leaders to apply the state of the art in AI to our business.

Responsibilities

• Partner with a cross-functional team of data scientists, software engineers, machine learning engineers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products that change how customers interact with their money.
• Leverage a broad stack of technologies — PyTorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning, VectorDBs, and more — to reveal the insights hidden within huge volumes of numeric and textual data.
• Build AI foundation models through all phases of development, from design through training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
• Engage in high-impact applied research to take the latest AI developments and push them into the next generation of customer experiences.
• Flex your interpersonal skills to translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals.
• Deliver libraries, platform-level code, or solution-level code to existing products.
• Own and pursue a research agenda, including choosing impactful research problems and autonomously carrying out long-running projects.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining, a PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields (degree must be obtained on or before the scheduled start date), or an M.S. in the same fields plus 2 years of experience in Applied Research.

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or related fields.
• PhD focus on NLP or Master’s with 5 years of industrial NLP research experience.
• Multiple publications on topics related to the pre-training of large language models (e.g., technical reports of pre-trained LLMs, SSL techniques, model pre-training optimization).
• Member of a team that has trained a large language model from scratch (10B+ parameters, 500B+ tokens).
• Publications in deep learning theory or at conferences such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.
• PhD focused on topics related to guiding LLMs with further tasks (Supervised Fine-tuning, Instruction-Tuning, Dialogue-Fine-tuning, Parameter Tuning).
• Demonstrated knowledge of principles of transfer learning, model adaptation, and model guidance.
• Experience deploying a fine-tuned large language model.
• Publications studying tokenization, data quality, dataset curation, or labeling.
• Contribution to a major open-source corpus or open-source libraries for data quality, dataset curation, or labeling.

Skills

• Comfort with open-source languages and passion for developing further.
• Hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud computing platforms.
• Deep understanding of the foundations of AI methodologies.
• Experience building large deep learning models (language, images, events, or graphs).
• Expertise in one or more of the following: training optimization, self-supervised learning, robustness, explainability, RLHF.
• Engineering mindset with a track record of delivering models at scale (training data and inference volumes).
• Ability to analyze and create while maintaining a passion for ethical decision-making.
• Innovative mindset with a focus on evaluating emerging technologies.
• Creative problem-solving for big, undefined challenges.
• Leadership in challenging conventional thinking and improving the status quo.
• Passion for talent development.

Pay

The annual full-time salary ranges for this role by location are:

• Cambridge, MA: $218,700 - $249,600 (Applied Researcher I)
• McLean, VA: $218,700 - $249,600 (Applied Researcher I)
• New York, NY: $238,600 - $272,300 (Applied Researcher I)
• San Jose, CA: $238,600 - $272,300 (Applied Researcher I)

Candidates hired in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location. This role is also eligible for performance-based incentive compensation, including cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives (LTI).

Benefits

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

Learn more at the Capital One Careers website.