Capital One
Applied Researcher 4 (AI Foundations, VLM Customization)
$219K–$272K
San Jose, CA +3 · Full-time · Posted Oct 30, 2026
- Location
- San Jose, CA
McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
New York, NY - Experience
- 2 years of Applied Research experience for the M.S. pathway. Preferred alternatives include a PhD focused on NLP or a master’s plus 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 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 research and build, train, evaluate, and implement AI foundation models, including customized language and vision models, for 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; apply current AI research to customer experiences.
- Collaborate on internal technical reports or conference submissions and translate research into business goals.
What they ask for
- Currently has or is obtaining a PhD in a listed technical field, or has an M.S. in a listed technical 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 research contributions in LLM pre-training, deep learning, or related areas; conference publications at ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.
- Experience training a large language model from scratch, deploying a fine-tuned LLM, or contributing to open-source data or AI tools.
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 research and development of AI foundation models, including LLM pre-training, fine-tuning, model adaptation, and data preparation; the role title specifies VLM customization.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative