Applied Researcher 4 (AI Foundations)

About the Role

At Capital One, we are creating trustworthy and reliable AI systems, changing banking for good. 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. You will help bring the transformative power of emerging AI capabilities to reimagine how we serve our customers and businesses.

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.

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.
• Leverage a broad stack of technologies — Pytorch, AWS Ultraclusters, Huggingface, Lightning, and more — to reveal insights within numeric and textual data.
• Build AI foundation models through all phases of development: design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
• Engage in high-impact applied research to advance customer experiences.
• Translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals.
• Collaborate with senior researchers to prepare internal tech reports or conference submissions summarizing novel methods or findings.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Pytorch
• AWS Ultraclusters
• Huggingface
• Lightning
• Open-source languages
• Cloud computing platforms

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining, a PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields, with an exception that the required degree will be obtained on or before the scheduled start date.
• Or, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 2 years of experience in Applied Research.

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering or related fields.
• Experience with 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 a 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.
• Expertise in 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: 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.
• Expertise in 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.