Applied Researcher I (AI Foundations)

Responsibilities

• Partner with cross-functional teams of data scientists, software engineers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products.
• Build AI foundation models through all development phases, including design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
• Leverage technologies such as PyTorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning, and VectorDBs to analyze large-scale numeric and textual data.
• Engage in high-impact applied research to integrate the latest AI developments into next-generation customer experiences.
• Translate complex research findings into tangible business goals and actionable insights.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Alternatively, a Master's degree in a related field plus 2 years of experience in Applied Research.
• Hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud computing platforms.
• Experience building large deep learning models (e.g., language, images, events, or graphs).
• Deep understanding of AI methodologies, including training optimization, self-supervised learning, robustness, explainability, or RLHF.
• An engineering mindset with a track record of delivering models at scale for both training and inference.

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP) or extensive industrial NLP research experience.
• Experience as a member of a team that has trained large language models (10B+ parameters, 500B+ tokens) from scratch.
• Publications in top-tier venues such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.
• Expertise in model optimization techniques including sparsification, quantization, training parallelism, or model compression.
• Experience with fine-tuning techniques such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Instruction-Tuning, or Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT).

About the Company

Capital One is building trustworthy and reliable AI systems to transform the banking experience. Our AI Foundations team works at the center of the research life cycle, from partnering with academia to building production-scale systems that bring humanity and simplicity to banking.