Capital One
Applied Researcher 4 (AI Foundations: Recommendation Systems)
$219K–$272K
McLean, VA +3 · Full-time · Posted Oct 16, 2026
- Location
- McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
San Jose, CA
New York, NY - Experience
- 2 years in Applied Research with an M.S. is the stated alternative to the PhD qualification; no years specified for the PhD route. Preferred: a Master’s with 5 years of industrial NLP research experience, or multiple years in specified optimization topics.
- 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 deploy foundation models and AI-powered products for customer experiences, with a focus on recommendation systems.
What you'll do
- Partner with data scientists, engineers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products.
- Develop 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
- PhD in a related field, completed by the scheduled start date, or an M.S. in a related field plus 2 years of experience in Applied Research.
- 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 delivering libraries, platform-level code, or solution-level code to existing products.
Nice to have
- Multiple publications related to large language models or deep learning, including at named research conferences.
- Experience training, optimizing, or deploying large language models, or reproducing and extending peer-reviewed AI research.
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 AI research and development of foundation models and AI-powered customer products, including large language model pretraining, optimization, and finetuning.
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