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Capital One · 2 hours ago

Current PhD, Applied Research Internship Program - Summer 2026

Cambridge, MA

Internship

Hybrid

Intern

$191K/yr - $209K/yr

Start in 2026 Summer

Capital One is a leading financial services company focused on creating trustworthy and reliable AI systems. They are seeking a PhD intern for a summer applied research experience, where the intern will engage in high-impact applied research and collaborate with cross-functional teams to design AI-powered products that enhance customer interactions.

BankingCredit CardsFinanceFinancial Services

Comp. & Benefits

No H1B

Responsibilities

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

Qualification

PhD in relevant fieldProgramming experienceDeep learning frameworkResearch publicationsFoundation ModelsReinforcement LearningCausal InferenceUser Behavior ModelingModel Inference OptimizationResponsible AI ModelsInnovative mindsetTechnical foundation in mathematicsDeterminationInterpersonal skillsCreative problem solving

Required

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

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 pre-training, LLMs (Agentic AI, Reasoning, Test Time Compute Models, Mixture of Experts), Reinforcement Learning (World Models, Reasoning, GRPO, PPO, RLHF), Causal Inference, User Behavior Modeling, Model Inference Optimization, Interpretability, Responsible/Trustworthy AI Models