Staff AI Foundation Scientist

Capital One National Association; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 306,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One is seeking a Staff Applied Researcher in McLean, VA to advance AI foundation models and real-time ML for banking products. You will partner with data scientists, engineers, and product managers to translate research into scalable, production-ready solutions.

You'll lead cutting-edge work in graph/sequence modeling, operating across design, training, evaluation, and deployment stages, while mentoring teams and representing Capital One in the research community.

Qualifications

• PhD in related field plus 4 years applied research experience
• Demonstrated history of leading multi-year research programs that shaped AI subfields
• Experience delivering libraries, platform level code or solution level code to products
• Publications or projects demonstrating high-quality ideas in ML

Responsibilities

• Partner with a cross-functional team of data scientists, software engineers, ML engineers and product managers to deliver AI-powered products.
• Leverage a broad stack of technologies — PyTorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning, to analyze large numeric/text data.
• Build AI foundation models through all phases of development from design through training/evaluation/implementation.
• Engage in high-impact applied research to push AI developments into customer experiences.
• Translate the complexity of research into tangible business goals.
• Define and steward novel research directions aligning with the organization’s long-term scientific agenda.

Skills

Geometric deep learning

Graph neural networks

Large language models

Open-source frameworks

Production deployment

Research leadership

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related fields

MS in Electrical Engineering or related fields

Tools

PyTorch

HuggingFace

AWS

Lightning

Job description

Capital One is seeking a Staff Applied Researcher in McLean, VA to advance AI foundation models and real-time ML for banking products. You will partner with data scientists, engineers, and product managers to translate research into scalable, production-ready solutions.

You'll lead cutting-edge work in graph/sequence modeling, operating across design, training, evaluation, and deployment stages, while mentoring teams and representing Capital One in the research community.