Applied Researcher I

Center 3 (19075), United States of America, McLean, VirginiaApplied Researcher I

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.

In this role, you will:

• 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, VectorDBs, 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.

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:

• Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining, a PhD, with an expectation that required degree will be obtained on or before the scheduled start date or M. S. with at least 2 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 5 years of industrial NLP research experience

  • Multiple publications 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)

  • Member of team that has trained a large language model from scratch (10B + parameters, 500B+ tokens)

  • Publications in deep learning theory

  • Publications at ACL, NAACL and EMNLP, Neurips, ICML or ICLR

• Optimization (Training & Inference)

  • PhD focused on topics related to optimizing training of very large deep learning models

  • Multiple years of experience and/or publications on one of the following topics: Model Sparsification, Quantization, Training Parallelism/Partitioning Design, Gradient Checkpointing, Model Compression

  • Experience optimizing training for a 10B+ model

  • Deep knowledge of deep learning algorithmic and/or optimizer design

  • Experience with compiler design

• 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

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 nu.