Current PhD, Applied Research Intern - Summer 2025

Current PhD, Applied Research Intern - Summer 2025

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 delivering 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.

Participation in the program requires that you are located in the continental United States with in-person attendance at your assigned location, in accordance with Capital One’s hybrid working model.

This is a paid internship. This is a limited-time internship position, and Capital One will not sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization for this position. However, a full-time Applied Research role, for which you may be considered upon completion of the internship (subject to business need, market conditions, and other factors) is eligible for employer immigration sponsorship.

Basic Qualifications:

• Currently enrolled in an accredited PhD Program 

• Completed 2nd year of PhD coursework by program start date (for example: 2nd year of PhD program completed by program start date OR qualifies, at minimum, as a 2nd year in PhD program because of completed Master’s)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Completed 3rd or 4th year of PhD Program

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering or related fields

• Programming experience (e.g. Python) and experience with at least one deep learning framework (e.g. PyTorch)

• Publications in leading conferences such as ICLR, NeurIPs, ICML, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, KDD, or CVPR

• Focused area of research in one of the following areas:

  • Foundation Models (Language, Vision, Graphs, Time Series), including finetuning and pretraining

  • Causal Inference

  • Reinforcement Learning

  • User Behavior Modeling

  • Model Optimization

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: 

• Join Capital One for a full-time, 12 week, summer applied research experience, discovering solutions to real world, large-scale problems.

• Engage in high impact applied research with the goal of taking the latest AI developments and pushing them into the next generation of customer experiences, or contributing to publications in this field.

• Partner with a cross-functional team of applied researchers, data scientists, software engineers, machine learning engineers and product managers to test and design 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.

• Flex your interpersonal skills to translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals.

• Partner with leading researchers to publish papers at top academic conferences.

• Develop professionally through networking sessions, technical deep dives and executive speaker sessions from across Capital One. 

The Ideal Candidate:

• You love the process of analyzing and creating,