Applied Researcher I (AI Foundations)

Capital One
Cambridge, MA, USA / McLean, VA, USA / New York, NY, USA2026-02-26Full time

About the job

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

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.

Flex your interpersonal skills to translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals.

Qualifications

Minimum

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 required degree will be obtained on or before the scheduled start date or M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 2 years of experience in Applied Research

Preferred

PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering or related fields

LLM

PhD focus on NLP or Masters with 5 years of industrial NLP research experience

Multiple publications on topics related to the pre-training of large language models (e.g. technical reports of pre-trained LLMs, SSL techniques, model pre-training optimization)

Member of team that has trained a large language model from scratch (10B + parameters, 500B+ tokens)

Publications in deep learning theory

Publications at ACL, NAACL and EMNLP, Neurips, ICML or ICLR

Optimization (Training & Inference)

PhD focused on topics related to optimizing training of very large deep learning models

Multiple years of experience and/or publications on one of the following topics: Model Sparsification, Quantization, Training Parallelism/Partitioning Design, Gradient Checkpointing, Model Compression

Experience optimizing training for a 10B+ model

Deep knowledge of deep learning algorithmic and/or optimizer design

Experience with compiler design

Finetuning

PhD focused on topics related to guiding LLMs with further tasks (Supervised Finetuning, Instruction-Tuning, Dialogue-Finetuning, Parameter Tuning)

Demonstrated knowledge of principles of transfer learning, model adaptation and model guidance

Experience deploying a fine-tuned large language model