Capital One
Applied Researcher 5
$262K–$327K
McLean, VA +3 · Full-time · Posted Sep 18, 2026
- Location
- McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
San Jose, CA
New York, NY - Experience
- PhD route: 2 years in Applied Research; M.S. route: 4 years in Applied Research. Preferred NLP route also mentions 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; or M.S. in those fields or related fields. PhD may be in progress if obtained by the scheduled start date.
- Visa sponsorship
- Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
About the job
Leads applied research and development of AI foundation models, translating research into scalable, production AI products for banking customers.
What you'll do
- Partner with cross-functional teams to develop AI-powered customer products and translate research into business outcomes.
- Build foundation models through design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
- Lead research from prototype development through deployment with ML engineering partners.
What they ask for
- Currently has or is obtaining a PhD in a listed related field, plus 2 years of Applied Research experience; or an M.S. in a listed related field plus 4 years of Applied Research experience.
- Hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud 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 providing libraries, platform-level code, or solution-level code to existing products.
Nice to have
- Publications in relevant venues or on large language model pre-training, deep learning theory, or related topics.
- Experience training or optimizing 10B+ parameter models, or deploying fine-tuned large language models.
Pay
$262,500 - $299,600 USD base salary (Cambridge, MA); $262,500 - $299,600 USD base salary (McLean, VA); $286,400 - $326,800 USD base salary (New York, NY); $286,400 - $326,800 USD base salary (San Jose, CA)
Tools
Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning
AI focus
Applied AI research and development of foundation models, including training, evaluation, validation, deployment, and production scaling; areas include LLMs, self-supervised learning, robustness, explainability, and RLHF.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative