Capital One
Applied Researcher 5
$262K–$327K
McLean, VA +4 · Full-time · Posted Oct 27, 2026
- Location
- McLean, VA
San Francisco, CA
Cambridge, MA
San Jose, CA
New York, NY - Experience
- 2 years in Applied Research with the PhD pathway, or 4 years with the M.S. pathway; preferred qualifications also state 5+ years of experience and/or publications for specified model optimization topics.
- Education
- Currently has or is obtaining a PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields; alternatively, an M.S. in those fields or related fields.
- Visa sponsorship
- Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
About the job
Leads applied AI research and develops foundation models from design through production deployment to power customer-facing banking experiences.
What you'll do
- Build and develop AI foundation models, including training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
- Lead cross-functional research work that bridges model prototypes and production deployment.
- Apply emerging AI research to customer products and translate technical work into business goals.
What they ask for
- Currently has or is obtaining a PhD in a listed or related field, with 2 years of Applied Research experience; alternatively, an M.S. in a listed or related field plus 4 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 of delivering models at scale and delivering libraries, platform-level code, or solution-level code to existing products.
Nice to have
- Research or publications in geometric deep learning, model optimization, LLM fine-tuning, or data preparation.
- Experience with real-time and streaming environments, large-scale recommender systems, or open-source framework contributions.
Pay
$262,500 - $299,600 USD base salary (Cambridge, MA and McLean, VA); $286,400 - $326,800 USD base salary (New York, NY, San Francisco, CA, and San Jose, CA)
Tools
Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning, pytorch-geometric, DGL
AI focus
Applied research and development of foundation models, including large deep learning models, model training and optimization, evaluation, and production deployment.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative