Capital One
Applied Researcher 4 (AI Foundations: Multimodal Guardrails and VLM's)
$219K–$272K
Cambridge, MA +3 · Full-time · Posted Oct 8, 2026
- Location
- Cambridge, MA
McLean, VA
San Jose, CA
New York, NY - Experience
- 2 years of Applied Research with a relevant M.S.; alternatively, currently has or is obtaining a relevant PhD. Preferred: 5 years of industrial NLP research experience for candidates with a master’s degree.
- 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
Develops and deploys AI foundation models and applied research for customer-facing products, with a focus indicated by the role title on multimodal guardrails and vision-language models.
What you'll do
- Build foundation models through design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
- Conduct applied AI research and bring developments into customer experiences and production systems.
- Work with cross-functional teams and communicate research findings through reports or conference submissions.
What they ask for
- Currently has or is pursuing a relevant PhD, or has a relevant M.S. 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 delivering models at scale.
- Track record of machine-learning contributions and ability to own and pursue a research agenda.
Nice to have
- Relevant PhD; NLP-focused PhD or a master’s degree with 5 years of industrial NLP research experience is also listed.
- Relevant publications or experience in LLM pre-training, optimization, fine-tuning, or deep learning theory.
Pay
Cambridge, MA: $218,700 - $249,600 USD annual base salary; McLean, VA: $218,700 - $249,600 USD annual base salary; New York, NY: $238,600 - $272,300 USD annual base salary; San Jose, CA: $238,600 - $272,300 USD annual base salary
Tools
Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning, LLM
AI focus
Applied research and development of AI foundation models, including multimodal guardrails and vision-language models (as stated in the title), with work spanning training, evaluation, validation, deployment, optimization, and fine-tuning.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative