Staff Applied Researcher

Staff Applied Researcher

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

• •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.

The minimum and maximum full-time annual salaries for this role are listed below, by location. Please note that this salary information is solely for candidates hired to perform work within one of these locations, and refers to the amount Capital One is willing to pay at the time of this posting. Salaries for part-time roles will be prorated based upon the agreed upon number of hours to be regularly worked.

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 reflecte