Distinguished Applied Researcher

Overview

At Capital One, we are creating trustworthy and reliable AI systems, changing banking for good. For years, Capital One has led 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 and ML are bringing humanity and simplicity to banking. We are committed to building world-class applied science and engineering teams and continuing 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 the 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.

This is an individual contributor (IC) role driving strategic direction through collaboration with Applied Science, Engineering and Product leaders across Capital One. As a well-respected IC leader, you will guide and mentor a team of applied scientists and their managers without being a direct people leader. You will be expected to be an external leader representing Capital One in the research community, collaborating with prominent faculty members in the relevant AI research community.

Ideal Candidate

• You love the process of analyzing and creating, and you share our passion to do the right thing. At the end of the day, it''s about making the right decision for our customers.
• Innovative. You continually research and evaluate emerging technologies. You stay current on published state-of-the-art methods, technologies, and applications and seek opportunities to apply them.
• Creative. You thrive on bringing definition to big, undefined problems. You love asking questions and pushing hard to find answers. Youre not afraid to share a new idea.
• Leader. You challenge conventional thinking and work with stakeholders to identify and improve the status quo. Youre passionate about talent development for your own team and beyond.
• Technical. You are comfortable with open-source languages and are passionate about developing further. You have hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud computing platforms.
• Has a deep understanding of the foundations of AI methodologies.
• Experience building large deep learning models, whether on language, images, events, or graphs, as well as expertise in training optimization, self-supervised learning, robustness, explainability, RLHF.
• An engineering mindset with a track record of delivering models at scale in terms of training data and inference volumes.
• Experience delivering libraries, platform-level code or solution-level code to existing products.
• A professional with a track record of new ideas or improvements in machine learning, demonstrated by accomplishments such as first-author publications or projects.
• Possess the ability to own and pursue a research agenda, including choosing impactful research problems and autonomously carrying out long-running projects.

Key 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.
• 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.
• Leverage a broad stack of technologies - PyTorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Hugging Face, Lightning, VectorDBs, and more - to reveal insights from large volumes of numeric and textual data.
• Translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals through strong interpersonal communication.

Basic Qualifications

• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 4 years of experience in Applied Research, or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 6 years of experience in Applied Research.

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering or related fields.
• LLM
• PhD focus on NLP or Masters with 10 years of industrial NLP research experience.
• Core contributor to a team that has trained a large language model from scratch (10B+ parameters, 500B+ tokens) or through continued pre-training, post-training pipeline for alignment and reasoning, LLM optimizations, complex reasoning with multi-agent LLMs.
• Numerous publications at ACL, NAACL and EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR on topics related to pre-training of large language models.
• Has worked on an LLM (open source or commercial) that is currently available for use.
• Demonstrated ability to guide the technical direction of a large-scale model training team.
• Experience with common training optimization frameworks (DeepSpeed, NeMo).
• Experience contributing to the team that has trained a large language model from scratch (10B+ parameters, 500B+ tokens) or through continued pre-training, post-training pipeline for alignment and reasoning, LLM optimizations, complex reasoning with multi-agent LLMs.

Capital One will sponsor qualified applicants for employment authorization for this position.

The minimum and maximum full-time annual salaries for this role are listed below, by location. Salaries for part-time roles will be prorated based upon the agreed upon number of hours to be regularly worked. Location-based ranges: Sales Territory: $273,000 - $311,500; Cambridge, MA: $300,200 - $342,600; McLean, VA: $300,200 - $342,600; New York, NY: $327,600 - $373,800; Richmond, VA: $273,000 - $311,500; San Francisco, CA: $327,600 - $373,800.

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location, and the actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate's offer letter.

This role is also eligible to earn performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives (LTI). Incentives could be discretionary or non-discretionary depending on the plan.

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well-being. Learn more at the Capital One Careers website. Eligibility varies based on full or part-time status, exempt or non-exempt status, and management level.

This role is expected to accept applications for a minimum of 5 business days. No agencies please. Capital One is an equal opportunity employer (EOE, including disability/vet) committed to non-discrimination in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Capital One promotes a drug-free workplace. Capital One will consider for employment qualified applicants with a criminal history in a manner consistent with applicable laws regarding criminal background inquiries.

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Capital One Financial is made up of several different entities. Positions posted in Canada, the United Kingdom, or the Philippines are for Capital One Canada, Capital One Europe, or Capital One Philippines Service Corp. respectively.