Senior AI Foundation Researcher

Capital One; Illinois; On-site; USD 263,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One is seeking an Applied Researcher 5 to advance AI foundations and large language models. You will collaborate with data scientists, software engineers, and product managers to transform cutting‑edge research into scalable, real‑world banking solutions.

You will work across PyTorch, HuggingFace, AWS Ultraclusters, and Lightning to push the state of the art, focusing on training optimization, robustness, and deployment at scale.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing or have completed a PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related field, with start date requirements as described.
• Strong track record in AI/ML research, with publications or project-driven demonstrations.
• Experience delivering libraries or platform-level code to production systems.
• Hands-on experience building AI foundation models and using open-source tools and cloud platforms.
• Knowledge of training optimization, self-supervised learning, robustness, explainability, and RLHF.

Responsibilities

• Partner with data scientists, software engineers, ML engineers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products.
• Leverage PyTorch, AWS Ultraclusters, HuggingFace, Lightning to extract insights from large data sets.
• Build AI foundation models from design to training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Translate complex research into tangible business outcomes and production impact.
• Lead cross-functional research threads bridging prototype models and production ML engineering.
• Communicate effectively to align research with strategic goals.

Skills

Large language models

Deep learning

Model training

Distributed computing

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

MS with NLP focus

Tools

PyTorch

AWS

HuggingFace

Lightning

Job description

Capital One is seeking an Applied Researcher 5 to advance AI foundations and large language models. You will collaborate with data scientists, software engineers, and product managers to transform cutting‑edge research into scalable, real‑world banking solutions.

You will work across PyTorch, HuggingFace, AWS Ultraclusters, and Lightning to push the state of the art, focusing on training optimization, robustness, and deployment at scale.