Staff Applied Researcher

Capital One; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 334,000 - 381,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Performance-based incentives

Job summary

Capital One is seeking a Staff Applied Researcher to advance AI foundations and scalable ML systems in its AI Foundations team. You will collaborate with data scientists, engineers and product leaders to design and deliver AI-powered banking experiences.

The role involves guiding research directions, developing production-ready models, and representing Capital One in the research community. Strong publications or project impact are valued.

Qualifications

• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields with 4+ years of applied research, or MS with 6+ years of applied research.
• Experience building AI foundation models and deploying ML libraries at scale.
• Strong publishing record or equivalent demonstrated by impactful projects.

Responsibilities

• Partner with data scientists, software engineers, ML engineers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products.
• Build AI foundation models from design through training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
• Engage in high-impact applied research and translate findings into deployable capabilities.
• Define new research directions and translate discoveries into business outcomes.

Skills

AI foundation models

Open-source tools

GPU clusters

Cloud platforms

Production systems

Education

PhD in Computer Science

MS in Electrical Engineering

Tools

PyTorch

AWS

Huggingface

Lightning

Job description

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.

This is an individual contributor (IC) role driving strategic direction through collaboration with Applied Science, Engineering and Product leaders across Capital One. As a well‑respected IC leader, you will guide and mentor a team of applied scientists and their managers without being a direct people leader. You will be expected to be an external leader representing Capital One in the research community, collaborating with prominent faculty members in the relevant AI research community.

What You’ll Do

• 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, 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.
• Define and steward novel research directions that expand the organization’s long‑term scientific agenda, ensuring foundational discoveries translate into deployable capabilities

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 high quality 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

Basic Qualifications

• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 4 years of experience in Applied Research or M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 6 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)
• Behavioral Models
  • PhD focus on topics in geometric deep learning (Graph Neural Networks, Sequential Models, Multivariate Time Series)
  • Member of technical leadership for model deployment for a very large user behavior model
  • Multiple papers on topics relevant to training models on graph and sequential data structures at KDD, ICML, NeurIps, ICLR
  • Worked on scaling graph models to greater than 50m nodes Experience with large scale deep learning based recommender systems
  • Experience with production real‑time and streaming environments
  • Contributions to common open source frameworks (pytorch‑geometric, DGL)
  • Proposed new methods for inference or representation learning on graphs or sequences
  • Worked datasets with 100m+ users
• Optimization (Training & Inference)
  • PhD focused on topics related to optimizing training of very large language models
  • 5+ years of experience and/or publications on one of the following topics: Model Sparsification, Quantization, Training Parallelism/Partitioning Design, Gradient Checkpointing, Model Compression
• 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
• Data Preparation
  • Numerous Publications studying tokenization, data quality, dataset curation, or labeling
  • Leading contributions to one or more large open source corpus (1 Trillion + tokens)
  • Core contributor to open source libraries for data quality, dataset curation, or labeling
• Demonstrated history of initiating and leading multi‑year research programs that shaped the direction of AI or ML subfields (e.g., representation learning, foundation models, multimodal reasoning)

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

Cambridge, MA: $306,300 - $349,500 for Staff Applied Researcher

McLean, VA: $306,300 - $349,500 for Staff Applied Researcher

New York, NY: $334,100 - $381,300 for Staff Applied Researcher

San Francisco, CA: $334,100 - $381,300 for Staff Applied Researcher

San Jose, CA: $334,100 - $381,300 for Staff Applied Researcher

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location, and the actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate’s offer letter.

This role is also eligible to earn performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI). Incentives could be discretionary or non discretionary depending on the plan.

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well‑being. Learn more at the Capital One Careers website. Eligibility varies based on full or part‑time status, exempt or non‑exempt status, and management level.

This role is expected to accept applications for a minimum of 5 business days.

No agencies please. Capital One is an equal opportunity employer (EOE, including disability/vet) committed to non‑discrimination in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Capital One promotes a drug‑free workplace. Capital One will consider for employment qualified applicants with a criminal history in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable laws regarding criminal background inquiries, including, to the extent applicable, Article 23‑A of the New York Correction Law; San Francisco, California Police Code Article 49, Sections 4901‑4920; New York City’s Fair Chance Act; Philadelphia’s Fair Criminal Records Screening Act; and other applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations regarding criminal background inquiries.

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Capital One Financial is made up of several different entities. Please note that any position posted in Canada is for Capital One Canada, any position posted in the United Kingdom is for Capital One Europe and any position posted in the Philippines is for Capital One Philippines Service Corp. (COPSSC).