Capital One
Applied Researcher 5 (AI Foundations - LLM, Optimization and Finetuning)
$262K–$327K
New York, NY +3 · Full-time · Posted Sep 23, 2026
- Location
- New York, NY
McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
San Jose, CA - Experience
- PhD route: 2 years in Applied Research; alternatively, M.S. route: 4 years in Applied Research. Some preferred pathways specify 5 years of industrial NLP research experience or multiple years in model optimization.
- Education
- PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or a related field, or M.S. in one of these fields or related fields.
- Visa sponsorship
- Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
About the job
Lead applied research and development of AI foundation models, especially LLMs, from research and training through evaluation and deployment into customer-facing products.
What you'll do
- Build foundation models through design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
- Lead cross-functional research efforts that move model prototypes into production with ML engineering partners.
- Apply emerging AI research to customer experiences and communicate research outcomes in business terms.
What they ask for
- PhD in a related field plus 2 years of Applied Research experience, or an M.S. in a related field plus 4 years of Applied Research experience; the PhD may be obtained by the scheduled start date.
- Deep understanding of AI methodologies and experience building large deep learning models, with expertise in areas such as 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.
- Ability to own a research agenda and pursue long-running projects; demonstrated ML research accomplishments such as first-author publications or projects.
Nice to have
- Experience training a 10B+ parameter LLM from scratch on 500B+ tokens, with related publications.
- Relevant publications or experience in deep learning optimization, fine-tuning, NLP, or deep learning theory.
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 research and engineering for foundation models and LLMs, including pre-training, training and inference optimization, and fine-tuning; deployment into production AI products.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative