Staff Applied Researcher (Remote Eligible)

Capital One Group; McLean (VA); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One is seeking a Staff Applied Researcher (Remote Eligible) to join the AI Foundations team in McLean, VA. You will mentor applied scientists and guide research directions, collaborating with engineers, product managers and data scientists to deploy AI-rich banking experiences.

A PhD or MS in a related field with several years of applied research is required, along with deep experience in large-scale model development and publications. Remote or hybrid work options are available.

Qualifications

• PhD or MS in a related field with several years of applied research experience.
• Experience building AI foundation models and large-scale training.
• Strong publication record in AI/ML/NLP conferences helps.

Responsibilities

• Partner with cross-functional teams to deliver AI-powered banking solutions.
• Build AI foundation models from design through deployment.
• Engage in high-impact applied research to translate AI advances into customer experiences.
• Mentor applied scientists and managers without direct people leadership.
• Represent Capital One in the research community.

Skills

Applied Research

Cross-functional teamwork

Strategic thinking

Education

PhD in Electrical Engineering / Computer Engineering / Computer Science / AI / Mathematics

MS in Electrical Engineering / Computer Engineering / Computer Science / AI / Mathematics

Tools

PyTorch

AWS Ultraclusters

Huggingface

Lightning

Job description

Staff Applied Researcher (Remote Eligible) 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 is 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
• Capital One is open to hiring a Remote or Hybrid Employee for this opportunity. If the role is designated as Hybrid, you are expected to adhere to Capital One's hybrid policy regarding required on-site presence at your designated office location. If the role is designated as Remote, you are expected to adhere to Capital One's Remote Worker Expectations.

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