Capital One
Principal Data Scientist, AI Foundations
$162K–$201K
New York, NY +2 · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 19, 2026
- Location
- New York, NY
McLean, VA
San Jose, CA - Experience
- 5 years of data analytics experience with a quantitative bachelor’s degree; 3 years with a quantitative master’s degree or quantitatively focused MBA; or no years specified with a quantitative PhD. Preferred: at least 3 years’ experience in Python, Scala, or R, machine learning, and SQL.
- Education
- A quantitative-field bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD; a quantitatively concentrated MBA is an alternative to the master’s degree. The required degree must be obtained by the scheduled start date.
- Visa sponsorship
- Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
About the job
Build and deploy scalable AI/ML and NLP solutions, including adapted and fine-tuned language models, for customer-facing features in Capital One’s mobile app.
What you'll do
- Partner with data science, engineering, and product teams to deliver AI-powered customer products.
- Design, train, evaluate, and validate machine learning and NLP models, then help operationalize them in scalable production systems.
- Apply NLP and large language models to customer-facing applications and communicate technical findings in business terms.
What they ask for
- A quantitative-field bachelor’s degree plus 5 years of data analytics experience; or a quantitative-field master’s degree or quantitatively focused MBA plus 3 years of data analytics experience; or a quantitative-field PhD.
- Hands-on experience with LLMs and open-source tools and cloud computing platforms.
- Experience training language models or large computer vision models, with expertise in at least one of training optimization, self-supervised learning, explainability, or RLHF.
- Track record delivering models at scale and experience delivering libraries, platforms, or solution-level code to existing products.
Nice to have
- Experience working with AWS.
- At least 3 years’ experience in Python, Scala, or R; machine learning; or SQL.
Pay
$161,800 - $184,600 USD base salary; $176,500 - $201,400 USD base salary
Tools
Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Hugging Face, LangChain, Lightning, VectorDBs, AWS, Python
AI focus
Develop, adapt, and fine-tune LLMs and other ML/NLP models for customer-facing products; experience includes training language or large computer vision models and expertise in a subdomain such as training optimization, self-supervised learning, explainability, or RLHF.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative