Capital One
Sr. Director, Applied Researcher
$350K–$436K
McLean, VA +4 · Director · Full-time · Posted Oct 14, 2026
- Location
- McLean, VA
San Francisco, CA
Cambridge, MA
San Jose, CA
New York, NY - Experience
- 6 years of Applied Research with a PhD, or 8 years with an M.S.; at least 5 years of people leadership experience.
- Education
- PhD or M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, 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 research teams in setting AI research strategy and developing foundation models and production AI systems for customer-facing products.
What you'll do
- Set the organization’s research vision and roadmap, aligning scientific work with business priorities.
- Lead, mentor, and develop applied scientists while collaborating with research, engineering, product, and business leaders.
- Guide AI foundation models through design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation; advance research into customer products.
What they ask for
- PhD in a listed related field plus 6 years of Applied Research experience, or an M.S. in a listed related field plus 8 years of Applied Research experience.
- At least 5 years of people leadership experience.
- Hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud platforms.
- Experience building large deep-learning models and production-grade systems with large-scale business impact.
Nice to have
- Experience with large language models, including pretraining, finetuning, optimization, or deployment.
- Research publications, open-source contributions, or experience scaling research organizations and cross-disciplinary programs.
Pay
$350,000 - $399,500 USD base salary (Cambridge, MA); $350,000 - $399,500 USD base salary (McLean, VA); $381,800 - $435,700 USD base salary (New York, NY); $381,800 - $435,700 USD base salary (San Francisco, CA); $381,800 - $435,700 USD base salary (San Jose, CA)
Tools
Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning, deep speed, nemo, pytorch-geometric, DGL
AI focus
Applied AI research and development of foundation models, including large language models and behavioral models; work spans model training, evaluation, optimization, finetuning, and production deployment.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative