Current PhD, Applied Research Internship Program - Summer 2026

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.

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

Skills

• 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)
• 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

Benefits

• Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well-being.

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