Lead Data Scientist: Transformers, RL & Personalization

Capital One; Plano (TX); On-site; USD 179,000 - 205,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One is seeking a data scientist to design and deploy large-scale recommender systems across digital channels. You will work on transformers, LLMs, and reinforcement learning to personalize experiences for millions of customers, while collaborating with engineering and product teams to deliver production-grade, low-latency solutions.

The role emphasizes data-driven decision making, distributed training, and building evaluation frameworks to prove impact, with competitive benefits and

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field plus 6 years of analytics experience.
• Master's degree in a quantitative field or MBA with quantitative concentration plus 4 years analytics.
• PhD in a quantitative field plus 1 year analytics experience.
• At least 1 year of experience leveraging open source languages for large scale data analysis.
• At least 1 year of experience working with machine learning.
• At least 1 year of experience utilizing relational databases.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop state‑of‑the‑art recommender systems using transformers, LLMs, and RL.
• Advance personalization through sequence modeling, multi‑modal learning, and contextual decision making.
• Build and fine‑tune foundation models trained on large‑scale customer data.
• Apply reinforcement learning to optimize long‑term user engagement and business outcomes.
• Build evaluation frameworks to measure campaign and system efficacy.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to deploy scalable, low‑latency systems.
• Drive innovation in generative recommendations and cross‑domain personalization.

Skills

Python programming

SQL

Machine learning

Deep learning

Recommender systems

Transformers/LLMs

Distributed training

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Big data analytics

Education

Bachelor's degree in quantitative field

Master's degree in quantitative field or MBA with quantitative concentration

PhD in quantitative field

Tools

SQL

AWS

Jupyter/Notebook tooling

Job description

Capital One is seeking a data scientist to design and deploy large-scale recommender systems across digital channels. You will work on transformers, LLMs, and reinforcement learning to personalize experiences for millions of customers, while collaborating with engineering and product teams to deliver production-grade, low-latency solutions.

The role emphasizes data-driven decision making, distributed training, and building evaluation frameworks to prove impact, with competitive benefits and