Capital One
Applied Researcher 4 (AI Foundations, LLM Core and Agentic AI)
$219K–$272K
New York, NY +3 · Full-time · Posted Sep 18, 2026
- Location
- New York, NY
McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
San Jose, CA - Experience
- 2 years in Applied Research for the M.S. qualification route; no years specified for the PhD route. Preferred NLP research alternative: 5 years of industrial NLP research with a Masters.
- Education
- PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields; or M.S. in those fields plus 2 years of Applied Research experience.
- Visa sponsorship
- Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
About the job
Conduct applied AI research and build, evaluate, and implement foundation models that power customer-facing products and scalable AI systems.
What you'll do
- Develop foundation models through design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
- Partner with data scientists, engineers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products and apply emerging research.
- Pursue research projects and communicate findings through internal technical reports or conference submissions.
What they ask for
- Currently has or is pursuing a PhD in a listed related field, or an M.S. in a listed related field plus 2 years of Applied Research experience.
- Deep understanding of AI methodologies and hands-on experience developing AI foundation models using open-source tools and cloud platforms.
- Experience building large deep learning models and expertise in at least one of: training optimization, self-supervised learning, robustness, explainability, or RLHF.
- Track record delivering models at scale and delivering libraries, platform-level code, or solution-level code to existing products.
Nice to have
- Multiple publications related to large language model pre-training, or publications at ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, Neurips, ICML, or ICLR.
- Experience training a large language model from scratch (10B+ parameters, 500B+ tokens), optimizing a 10B+ model, or deploying a fine-tuned LLM.
Pay
$218,700 - $249,600 USD base salary (Cambridge, MA); $218,700 - $249,600 USD base salary (McLean, VA); $238,600 - $272,300 USD base salary (New York, NY); $238,600 - $272,300 USD base salary (San Jose, CA)
Tools
Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning
AI focus
Applied research and development of AI foundation models, LLMs, and agentic AI, including model training, evaluation, optimization, fine-tuning, and production deployment.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative