Capital One
Applied Researcher 4 (AI Foundations - LLM, Optimization and Finetuning)
$219K–$272K
New York, NY +3 · Full-time · Posted Sep 21, 2026
- Location
- New York, NY
McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
San Jose, CA - Experience
- M.S. plus 2 years of experience in Applied Research is an alternative to the PhD pathway; preferred qualifications include a Master's with 5 years of industrial NLP research experience.
- Education
- PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields; alternatively, M.S. in one of those fields plus 2 years of Applied Research experience. A required degree may be obtained on or before the scheduled start date.
- Visa sponsorship
- Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
About the job
Conduct applied research and build, train, evaluate, validate, and implement AI foundation models that power customer-facing products.
What you'll do
- Partner with data scientists, engineers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products.
- Develop AI foundation models through design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
- Conduct applied research and communicate findings through internal technical reports or conference submissions.
What they ask for
- Currently have or be pursuing a PhD in a listed related field, or have an M.S. in a listed related field plus 2 years of Applied Research experience.
- Have hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud computing platforms.
- Demonstrate experience building large deep learning models and expertise in at least one of training optimization, self-supervised learning, robustness, explainability, or RLHF.
- Have a track record of delivering models at scale and delivering libraries, platform-level code, or solution-level code to existing products.
Nice to have
- Experience or publications in LLM pre-training, deep learning optimization, or fine-tuning; the posting also lists related PhD focus areas and publication venues.
- Experience training a large language model from scratch (10B+ parameters, 500B+ tokens) or optimizing training for a 10B+ model.
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 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, especially LLM pre-training, training and inference optimization, and fine-tuning.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative