Staff Applied Researcher

About the role

At Capital One, we are creating trustworthy and reliable AI systems that are changing banking for good. The AI Foundations team is at the center of bringing our vision for AI to life, touching 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 state‑of‑the‑art AI to our business. This individual‑contributor role drives strategic direction through collaboration with Applied Science, Engineering and Product leaders across Capital One. As a respected IC leader you will guide and mentor a team of applied scientists and their managers without being a direct people leader, represent Capital One externally in the research community, and collaborate with prominent faculty members in relevant AI research.

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 interpersonal skills to translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals.

Requirements

PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 4 years of experience in Applied Research; or M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 6 years of experience in Applied Research.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering or related fields.
• LLM focus on NLP or Masters with 10 years of industrial NLP research experience.
• Core contributor to team that has trained a large language model from scratch (10B+ parameters, 500B+ tokens) or through continued pre‑training, post‑training pipeline for alignment and reasoning, LLM optimizations, complex reasoning with multi‑agentic LLMs.
• Numerous publications at ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR on topics related to the pre‑training of large language models.
• Has worked on an LLM (open source or commercial) that is currently available for use.
• Demonstrated ability to guide the technical direction of a large‑scale model training team.
• Experience with common training optimization frameworks (DeepSpeed, Nemo).

Skills

• Proficiency with open‑source languages and AI/ML libraries (PyTorch, Huggingface, Lightning, VectorDBs).
• Experience training large deep learning models at scale (data volume and inference).
• Knowledge of training optimization, self‑supervised learning, robustness, explainability, RLHF.
• Engineering mindset with a track record of delivering models, libraries, platform‑level or solution‑level code to existing products.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills to translate technical work into business goals.

Benefits

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support total well‑being, plus eligibility for performance‑based incentive compensation (cash bonus and/or long‑term incentives).

Pay

• Sales Territory: $278,400 – $317,700 for Distinguished Applied Researcher
• Cambridge, MA: $306,300 – $349,500 for Distinguished Applied Researcher
• McLean, VA: $306,300 – $349,500 for Distinguished Applied Researcher
• New York, NY: $334,100 – $381,300 for Distinguished Applied Researcher
• San Francisco, CA: $334,100 – $381,300 for Distinguished Applied Researcher