Senior Director, Applied Research

Capital One•San Jose, CA

About The Position

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. 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 a people manager role that will lead teams to drive strategic direction through collaboration with Applied Science, Engineering and Product leaders across Capital One. As a well-respected people leader, you will guide and mentor a team of applied scientists. 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.

Requirements

PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 6 years of experience in Applied Research OR M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or related fields plus 8 years of experience in Applied Research.
At least 5 years of people leadership 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.
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 new 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.

Nice To Haves

PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering or related fields.
LLM PhD focus on NLP or Masters with 10 years of industrial NLP research experience.
Core contributor to team that has trained a large language model from scratch (10B + parameters, 500B+ tokens).
Numerous publications at ACL, NAACL and EMNLP, Neurips, ICML or ICLR 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).
Has worked on an LLM (open source or commercial) that is currently available for use.
Demonstrated ability to guide the technical direction of a large-scale model training team.
Experience working with 500+ node clusters of GPUs.
Has worked on LLM scaled to 70B parameters and 1T+ tokens.
Experience with common training optimization frameworks (deep speed, nemo).
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.

Responsibilities

Lead teams to drive strategic direction through collaboration with Applied Science, Engineering and Product leaders across Capital One.
Guide and mentor a team of applied scientists.
Be an external leader representing Capital One in the research community, collaborating with prominent faculty members in the relevant AI research community.
Partner with a cross-functional team of scientists, machine learning engineers, software engineers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered platforms and solutions that change how customers interact with their money.
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.
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.
Flex your interpersonal skills to translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals.

Benefits

Comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well-being.
Performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI).

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