Capital One
Applied Researcher 5 (AI Foundations, LLM Core and Agentic AI)
$262K–$327K
San Jose, CA +4 · Full-time · Posted Sep 18, 2026
- Location
- San Jose, CA
San Francisco, CA
McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
New York, NY - Experience
- 2 years in Applied Research with the stated PhD path, or 4 years with the M.S. path; preferred NLP alternative: 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. A PhD may be in progress if 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 AI research and build, evaluate, and deploy foundation models and LLM systems that power customer-facing products.
What you'll do
- Develop AI foundation models through design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
- Lead cross-functional research from prototype development through production deployment.
- Apply emerging AI research to customer experiences and translate research outcomes into business goals.
What they ask for
- Currently has or is obtaining a relevant PhD, with the stated degree timing exception, plus 2 years of Applied Research experience; or a relevant M.S. plus 4 years of Applied Research experience.
- Deep understanding of AI methodologies and hands-on experience building large deep learning models and AI foundation models.
- Experience delivering models at scale and delivering libraries, platform-level code, or solution-level code to existing products.
- Track record of high-quality machine learning ideas, such as first-author publications or projects, and ability to pursue an independent research agenda.
Nice to have
- Relevant PhD, or NLP-focused PhD or a master’s degree with 5 years of industrial NLP research experience; publications in relevant research areas or venues.
- Experience training a large language model from scratch (10B + parameters, 500B+ tokens), optimizing large models, fine-tuning LLMs, or preparing model-training data.
Pay
Cambridge, MA: $262,500 - $299,600 USD base salary; McLean, VA: $262,500 - $299,600 USD base salary; New York, NY: $286,400 - $326,800 USD base salary; San Francisco, CA: $286,400 - $326,800 USD base salary; San Jose, CA: $286,400 - $326,800 USD base salary
Tools
Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning
AI focus
Applied research and development of AI foundation models, LLM pre-training and optimization, fine-tuning, evaluation, and production deployment.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative