Applied Researcher II (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, and implementation.
• Leverage a broad technology stack including PyTorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning, and VectorDBs.
• Engage in high-impact applied research to translate the latest AI developments into next-generation customer experiences.
• Own and pursue a research agenda by identifying impactful problems and autonomously carrying out long-running projects.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field plus 2 years of experience in Applied Research, OR an MS in a related field plus 4 years of experience.
• Hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud computing platforms.
• Experience building large deep learning models (language, images, events, or graphs).
• Proficiency in open-source programming languages.
• Deep understanding of AI methodologies and expertise in areas such as training optimization, self-supervised learning, robustness, explainability, or RLHF.

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 a large language model from scratch (10B+ parameters).
• Expertise in model optimization, including quantization, sparsification, or training parallelism.
• Demonstrated knowledge of transfer learning, model adaptation, and fine-tuning principles.
• A track record of publications in top-tier venues such as ACL, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.

Benefits

• Comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive health, financial, and other benefits.
• Performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonuses or long-term incentives.
• Support for total well-being, including mental and physical health resources.

About the Company

Capital One is a leader in using machine learning to create real-time, intelligent, and automated customer experiences. The AI Foundations team works at the center of the research life cycle to build production systems and apply state-of-the-art AI to transform the banking industry.