Capital One
Applied Researcher 4 (AI Foundations, LLM Core and Agentic AI)
$219K–$272K
San Jose, CA +4 · Full-time · Posted Sep 18, 2026
- Location
- San Jose, CA
San Francisco, CA
McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
New York, NY - Experience
- M.S. plus 2 years of Applied Research experience; no years specified for the PhD path. Preferred: Masters with 5 years of industrial NLP research experience.
- Education
- PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields; or M.S. in those fields or related fields.
- Visa sponsorship
- Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
About the job
Conduct applied research and develop AI foundation models from design through deployment to power customer-facing banking products.
What you'll do
- Partner with data scientists, engineers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products.
- Build foundation models through training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
- Conduct applied research and communicate findings through internal reports or conference submissions.
What they ask for
- Currently have or be pursuing a PhD in a related field, or have an M.S. in a related field plus 2 years of Applied Research experience.
- Hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud platforms.
- Deep understanding of AI methodologies and experience building large deep learning models.
- Track record of delivering models at scale and delivering code or solutions to existing products.
Nice to have
- LLM-related experience or research, including pre-training, optimization, fine-tuning, or data preparation.
- Relevant publications, including at ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.
Pay
Cambridge, MA: $218,700 - $249,600 USD base salary; McLean, VA: $218,700 - $249,600 USD base salary; New York, NY: $238,600 - $272,300 USD base salary; San Francisco, CA: $238,600 - $272,300 USD base salary; San Jose, CA: $238,600 - $272,300 USD base salary
Tools
Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning
AI focus
Applied research and development of AI foundation models, including large language models, with work across training, optimization, evaluation, validation, fine-tuning, and deployment.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative