Sr. Distinguished Applied Researcher

Capital One; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial organization is looking for a Sr. Distinguished Applied Researcher to deliver AI-powered products and conduct high-impact research. The role requires a PhD in a relevant field or a Master's with extensive experience in applied research. The ideal candidate should have a deep understanding of AI methodologies, experience in developing foundation models, and proven ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams. Competitive salary and innovative work environment offered.

Qualifications

• PhD or M.S. in relevant fields with extensive experience in applied research.
• Experience in developing AI foundation models.
• Deep knowledge of AI methodologies.

Responsibilities

• Partner with cross-functional teams to deliver AI-powered products.
• Build AI foundation models across all development phases.
• Engage in impactful applied research to enhance customer experiences.

Skills

AI methodologies

Deep learning

Machine learning

Open-source languages

Interpersonal skills

Education

PhD in relevant field

M.S. in relevant field with additional experience

Tools

Pytorch

AWS Ultraclusters

Huggingface

Lightning

Job description

Sr. Distinguished Applied Researcher

Capital One

Overview

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.

In this role, you will:

• 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.

The Ideal Candidate

• You love the process of analyzing and creating, but also share our passion to do the right thing. You know 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 out opportunities to apply them.
• Creative. You thrive on bringing definition to big, undefined problems. You love asking questions and pushing hard to find answers. You’re not afraid to share a new idea.
• A leader. You challenge conventional thinking and work with stakeholders to identify and improve the status quo. You’re passionate about talent development for your own team and beyond.
• Technical. You’re 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 one or more of the following: training optimization, self‑supervised learning, robustness, explainability, RLHF.
• An engineering mindset as shown by a track record of delivering models at scale both in terms of training data and inference volumes.
• Experience in delivering libraries, platform level code or solution level code to existing products.
• A professional with a track record of coming up with new ideas or improving upon existing ideas 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 scientists, machine learning engineers, software engineers, and product managers to deliver AI‑powered platforms and solutions 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, Huggingface, Lightning, VectorDBs, and more — to reveal the insights hidden within huge volumes of numeric and textual data.
• Flex your interpersonal skills to translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals.

Basic Qualifications

• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 6 years of experience in Applied Research or M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 8 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 team that has trained a large language model from scratch (10B + parameters, 500B+ tokens)
• Numerous publications at ACL, NAACL and EMNLP, Neurips, ICML or ICLR 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)
• 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 working with 500+ node clusters of GPUs Has worked on LLM scaled to 70B parameters and 1T+ tokens
• Experience with common training optimization frameworks (deep speed, nemo)

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