Applied Researcher 1

Overview

Applied Researcher 1

At Capital One, we are creating trustworthy and reliable AI systems, changing banking for good. For years, Capital One has been leading the industry in using machine learning to create real-time, intelligent, automated customer experiences. From informing customers about unusual charges to answering their questions in real time, our applications of AI & ML are bringing humanity and simplicity to banking. We are committed to building world-class applied science and engineering teams and continue our industry leading capabilities with breakthrough product experiences and scalable, high-performance AI infrastructure. At Capital One, you will help bring the transformative power of emerging AI capabilities to reimagine how we serve our customers and businesses who have come to love the products and services we build.

Team Description

The AI Foundations team is at the center of bringing our vision for AI at Capital One to life. Our work touches every aspect of the research life cycle, from partnering with Academia to building production systems. We work with product, technology and business leaders to apply the state of the art in AI to our business.

Responsibilities

• Partner with a cross-functional team of data scientists, software engineers, machine learning engineers and product managers to deliver AI-powered products that change how customers interact with their money.
• Leverage a broad stack of technologies — Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning, VectorDBs, and more — to reveal the insights hidden within huge volumes of numeric and textual data.
• Build AI foundation models through all phases of development, from design through training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
• Engage in high impact applied research to take the latest AI developments and push them into the next generation of customer experiences.
• Translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals through strong interpersonal communication.

The Ideal Candidate

• You love the process of analyzing and creating, and you are committed to making the right decisions for customers.
• Innovative. You continually research and evaluate emerging technologies and stay current on state-of-the-art methods, technologies, and applications, seeking opportunities to apply them.
• Creative. You thrive on solving big, undefined problems, ask questions, and share new ideas.
• Leadership. You challenge conventional thinking, work with stakeholders to improve the status quo, and develop talent within and beyond your team.
• Technical. You are comfortable with open-source languages and have hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud computing platforms.
• Deep understanding of AI methodologies.
• Experience building large deep learning models (language, images, events, or graphs) with expertise in training optimization, self-supervised learning, robustness, explainability, RLHF.
• Engineering mindset with a track record of delivering models at scale for training data and inference volumes.
• Experience delivering libraries, platform-level code or solution-level code to existing products.
• Proven ability to generate high-quality ideas or improvements in machine learning, demonstrated by publications or notable projects.
• Ability to own and pursue a research agenda, including choosing impactful problems and carrying out long-running projects.

Basic Qualifications

• Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining, a PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields, with an exception that the required degree will be obtained on or before the start date, or an MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 2 years of experience in Applied Research.

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering or related fields
• LLM focused qualifications including PhD or Master’s with industrial NLP experience
• Publications on pre-training of large language models and related SSL techniques
• Experience training a large language model from scratch (10B+ parameters, 500B+ tokens)
• Publications in deep learning theory; publications at ACL/NAACL/EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR
• Optimization (Training & Inference): PhD on optimizing training of very large models; experience with model sparsification, quantization, training parallelism/partitioning, gradient checkpointing, model compression; experience optimizing training for 10B+ models; deep knowledge of DL algorithms and optimizers; experience with compiler design
• Finetuning: PhD on aligning LLMs with tasks (supervised finetuning, instruction-tuning, dialogue-finetuning, parameter tuning); knowledge of transfer learning and model guidance; experience deploying a fine-tuned LLM

Note: Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.

The minimum and maximum full-time annual salaries for this role are listed below, by location. Salaries are for work within the specified locations and refer to the amount Capital One is willing to pay at posting. Salaries for part-time roles will be prorated.

Cambridge, MA: $214,500 - $244,800 for Applied Researcher

McLean, VA: $214,500 - $244,800 for Applied Researcher

New York, NY: $234,000 - $267,000 for Applied Researcher

San Francisco, CA: $234,000 - $267,000 for Applied Researcher

San Jose, CA: $234,000 - $267,000 for Applied Researcher

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range of that location, and the actual salary offered will be stated in the offer letter.

This role is also eligible to earn performance-based incentive compensation, including cash bonuses and long-term incentives (LTI).

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits. Learn more at the Capital One Careers website. Eligibility varies based on status.

This role is expected to accept applications for at least 5 business days. No agencies please. Capital One is an equal opportunity employer (EOE, including disability/vet) committed to non-discrimination. Capital One promotes a drug-free workplace. Capital One will consider applicants with a criminal history in accordance with applicable laws.

If you require an accommodation during the recruitment process, please contact Capital One Recruiting at or via email at All information will be kept confidential and used only to provide needed accommodations.

For technical support or questions about Capital One's recruiting process, please email

Capital One does not provide or guarantee third-party products or services advertised on this site.

Capital One Financial is made up of several entities. Positions posted in Canada, the UK, or the Philippines correspond to Capital One Canada, Capital One Europe, or Capital One Philippines Service Corp. (COPSSC), respectively.