Applied Researcher 5 (AI Foundations: Evaluation and Agentic Workflows)

Applied Researcher 5 (AI Foundations: Evaluation and Agentic Workflows)

About Capital One

Capital One is creating trustworthy and reliable AI systems and changing banking for good. For years, the company has been leading the industry in using machine learning to create real-time, intelligent, automated customer experiences. Capital One is committed to building world-class applied science and engineering teams and continuing industry-leading capabilities with breakthrough product experiences and scalable, high-performance AI infrastructure.

Team Description

The AI Foundations team is at the center of bringing the vision for AI at Capital One to life. The team's work touches every aspect of the research life cycle, from partnering with Academia to building production systems. They work with product, technology, and business leaders to apply the state of the art in AI to the business.

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
• Translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals
• Lead cross-functional research threads that bridge prototype model development and deployment with ML engineering partners, ensuring scientific insights translate to production impact

The Ideal Candidate

Values and mindset

• You love the process of analyzing and creating, but also share the passion to do the right thing
• You know at the end of the day it's about making the right decision for customers
• 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
• 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
• 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 experience

• Comfortable with open-source languages and passionate about developing further
• Hands-on experience developing AI foundation models and solutions using open-source tools and cloud computing platforms
• Deep understanding of the foundations of AI methodologies
• Experience building large deep learning models, whether on language, images, events, or graphs
• Expertise in one or more of the following: training optimization, self-supervised learning, robustness, explainability, RLHF
• Engineering mindset as shown by a track record of delivering models at scale in terms of both training data and inference volumes
• Experience in delivering libraries, platform level code, or solution level code to existing products
• 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
• Ability to own and pursue a research agenda, including choosing impactful research problems and autonomously carrying out long-running projects

Basic Qualifications

• Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining, PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields, with the required degree obtained on or before the scheduled start date plus 2 years of experience in Applied Research

OR

• M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 4 years of experience in Applied Research

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or related fields
• PhD focus on topics in geometric deep learning (Graph Neural Networks, Sequential Models, Multivariate Time Series)
• 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 with datasets with 100m+ users
• Proven ability to design and lead small-scale research initiatives, guiding junior researchers or engineers through experimental design and evaluation

Work Arrangement

This role is designated as a hybrid position. You are expected to adhere to Capital One's hybrid policy regarding required on-site presence at your designated office location.

Compensation

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

Minimum and maximum full-time annual salaries by location:

• Cambridge, MA: $262,500 - $299,600
• McLean, VA: $262,500 - $299,600
• New York, NY: $286,400 - $326,800
• San Jose, CA: $286,400 - $326,800

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location. 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.

Benefits

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial, and other benefits that support total well-being. Eligibility varies based on full or part-time status, exempt or non-exempt status, and management level.

Application Details

• 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 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

Accommodations and Support

If you have visited the website in search of information on employment opportunities or to apply for a position and require an accommodation, please contact Capital One Recruiting at 1-800-304-9102 or via email at RecruitingAccommodation@capitalone.com. All information provided will be kept confidential and used only to the extent required to provide needed reasonable accommodations.

For technical support or questions about Capital One's recruiting process, please send an email to Careers@capitalone.com.