Capital One
Applied Researcher 4 (AI Foundations, LLM Customization and Finetuning)
$219K–$272K
San Jose, CA +3 · Full-time · Posted Oct 5, 2026
- Location
- San Jose, CA
McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
New York, NY - Experience
- 2 years of Applied Research experience for the M.S. pathway; otherwise no number of years stated.
- Education
- PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields; or M.S. in those fields or related 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 deploy foundation models, including customized and fine-tuned LLMs, for customer-facing products.
What you'll do
- Develop AI foundation models from design through training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
- Collaborate across research, engineering, product, and business teams to deliver AI-powered products and translate research into business outcomes.
- Conduct applied research and help prepare internal technical reports or conference submissions.
What they ask for
- Currently have or be pursuing a PhD in a listed or related field, with the degree obtained by the scheduled start date; or hold an M.S. in a listed or related field plus 2 years of Applied Research experience.
- Hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud computing 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
- Publications or experience related to pre-training, LLM finetuning, deep learning theory, or AI research reproducibility.
- Experience training an LLM from scratch, deploying a fine-tuned LLM, or contributing to open-source corpora or data-quality tools.
Pay
$218,700 - $249,600 USD base salary (Cambridge, MA and McLean, VA); $238,600 - $272,300 USD base salary (New York, NY and San Jose, CA)
Tools
Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning
AI focus
Applied research and development of AI foundation models, with emphasis on LLM pre-training, customization, finetuning, evaluation, and deployment.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative