Capital One
Applied Researcher 5 (AI Foundations, LLM Core and Agentic AI)
$262K–$327K
New York, NY +3 · Full-time · Posted Sep 18, 2026
- Location
- New York, NY
McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
San Jose, CA - Experience
- PhD route: 2 years in Applied Research; M.S. route: 4 years in Applied Research. Preferred NLP alternative: master's degree 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 or related fields. 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
Leads applied research and development of AI foundation models and LLM systems, taking research from design and training through evaluation and production deployment for customer-facing products.
What you'll do
- Partner with data scientists, engineers, and product managers to build AI-powered products.
- Develop foundation models through design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
- Lead research projects that connect prototype development with production deployment and business goals.
What they ask for
- Currently has or is pursuing 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 with 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 of delivering models at scale and delivering libraries, platform-level code, or solution-level code to products.
Nice to have
- PhD focused on NLP or a master's degree with 5 years of industrial NLP research experience; publications related to LLM pretraining.
- Experience training a 10B+ parameter model on 500B+ tokens, optimizing large models, or deploying a fine-tuned LLM.
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 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, large language models, and agentic AI, including pretraining, optimization, fine-tuning, evaluation, and production deployment.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative