Capital One
Applied Researcher 5
$262K–$327K
San Jose, CA +3 · Full-time · Posted Sep 29, 2026
- Location
- San Jose, CA
McLean, VA
Cambridge, MA
New York, NY - Experience
- 2 years in Applied Research with a PhD, or 4 years with an M.S.; preferred NLP experience includes 5 years of industrial research as an alternative to a PhD focused on NLP.
- Education
- Currently has or is pursuing a PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or a related field; alternatively, an M.S. in one of those fields or a related field.
- Visa sponsorship
- Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
About the job
Lead applied AI research and develop foundation models from design and training through evaluation and production deployment for customer-facing financial products.
What you'll do
- Partner with cross-functional teams to deliver AI-powered products and translate research into business goals.
- Build and evaluate AI foundation models using large numeric and textual datasets, then work with engineering partners to deploy them.
- Lead applied research threads that bring emerging AI methods into production systems and customer experiences.
What they ask for
- Currently has or is pursuing a PhD in a listed or related field, plus 2 years of Applied Research experience; alternatively, an M.S. in a listed or related field plus 4 years of Applied Research experience.
- Deep understanding of AI methodologies and hands-on experience developing AI foundation models 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 delivering libraries, platform-level code, or solution-level code to existing products.
Nice to have
- Publications or research experience related to large language model pre-training, deep learning theory, optimization, or fine-tuning; publications at ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.
- Experience training a 10B+ parameter model from scratch, optimizing a 10B+ model, compiler design, or leading small-scale research initiatives.
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 development of AI foundation models, including large language models, from design and training through evaluation, validation, and production deployment.
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