C

Capital One

Issues credit cards and runs a consumer bank

Principal Associate - Market Research & Intelligence

Full-Time
$109.9k - $137.9k/yr+ Performance-based incentives + Cash bonus(es) + Long-term incentives
Mid
Bachelor's, Master's
McLean, VA, USA+1 moreMore locations: Richmond, VA, USA
In Person
Business & StrategyCorporate Strategy
No H1B Sponsorship

About the job

Requirements
  • A bachelor's degree or military experience is required.
  • At least three years of experience managing relationships with online sample providers and survey platforms to ensure representative consumer data collection is required.
  • At least three years of experience in a marketing research or consumer insights role on the vendor or corporate side is required.
  • At least three years of experience executing projects using survey tools and syndicated market research sources is required.
  • At least two years of experience using Microsoft Excel is required.
  • At least two years of experience with market research and survey research methodologies such as persona segmentation, message testing, and brand health tracking is required.
Responsibilities
  • Manage and partner with external research vendors and oversee the full lifecycle of a research project.
  • Execute primary research studies and assess and select effective methodologies, such as online surveys, focus groups, and segmentation, to answer business questions and understand external trends and stakeholder behaviors and attitudes.
  • Develop research questionnaires, screeners, and sample plans aligned with study objectives and research best practices.
  • Deliver high-quality datasets by overseeing quality assurance checks and processes throughout the research lifecycle.
  • Leverage vendors and work with data analysts to analyze and interpret findings and translate them into meaningful insights.
  • Translate findings into clear, concise, and visually compelling reports that surface insights to drive strategy and decision-making.
  • Integrate primary research, secondary sources, and marketplace intelligence to tell holistic stories grounded in business context.
  • Maintain an internal knowledge database of primary and secondary research and tools, and serve as the point of contact for the research products.
Desired Qualifications
  • A master's degree in Business, Marketing, Market Research, Statistics, Behavioral Sciences, or Psychology is preferred.
  • Experience researching topics in financial services, public policy, public affairs, or community impact is preferred.
  • Experience designing and running large-scale measurement and tracking surveys is preferred.

About the company

C

Capital One

View
cbWebsite

Capital One runs a consumer and commercial bank that issues credit cards, takes deposits, and finances cars and businesses. Its Venture travel cards and Quicksilver cash-back cards let customers earn rewards on everyday spending, while its online banking tools manage payments and savings. Customers use checking and savings accounts through an app, branches, and cash machines, and commercial clients use treasury tools to manage company cash. The bank earns interest on loans and fees from banking and card transactions, with customer deposits helping fund its lending operations. Capital One was founded in 1994 and has its headquarters in McLean, Virginia.

Company Size

10,001+

Company Stage

IPO

Headquarters

McLean, Virginia

Founded

1994

Get referred to Capital One

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Profits support staying power: Capital One earned $3 billion in the June 2026 quarter, with revenue up 4% sequentially.
  • Early engineers get breadth: Capital One technology program participants rotate through two software engineering roles on different teams.
  • Business payments broaden the work: Capital One completed its Brex acquisition in April 2026, adding corporate finance software.

What critics are saying

  • Budget for commuting: Capital One requires hybrid associates in the office three days weekly; remote eligibility depends on role.
  • Two integrations eat profits: Discover and Brex integration cost Capital One $394 million in the June 2026 quarter.
  • Card lending concentrates exposure: Capital One credit-card segment held 60% of its average loans in the June 2026 quarter.

What makes Capital One unique

  • Cloud work predates the mergers: Capital One closed its legacy data centers in 2020 after moving to AWS.
  • It owns payment rails: Capital One controls Discover, PULSE and Diners Club networks, beyond issuing credit cards.
  • Bank-built software reaches other companies: Capital One sells Slingshot to control spending on Snowflake cloud databases.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

  • Medical, Dental, & Vision coverage
  • Onsite Health Centers
  • Prescription saving with network of local pharmacies
  • Stock Purchase Plan
  • Education Assistance
  • 401(k)
  • Flexible Spending Accounts
  • Life and Disability insurance
  • Generous paid time off + corporate & floating holidays
  • Registered dieticians on site, cooking classes and free virtual fitness classes
  • Employee Assistance Program

Company News

AGORÀ
Oct 30th, 2026
Bank AI costs: Capital One and bofa show no measured savings.

Bank AI costs: Capital One and bofa show no measured savings. 7 min listen · 1 listens · AG-RD-0759 Capital One distilled its open-weight models into smaller models for Chat Concierge and says this cut latency fivefold, CIO Dive reports[[1]]. Every figure in this story comes from the bank itself, and none has been verified externally so far. Prem Natarajan, Capital One's chief enterprise AI officer and chief scientist, presented the figure on October 22, 2026 at the Evident AI Symposium in New York, according to the session agenda[[2]]. CIO Dive framed the panel as a lesson in how banks keep AI costs in check. Yet the only measured results concern response speed and sales. Bank of America offered an architecture and a growing budget instead of a savings figure. Capital One shrank its models to sell cars. Chat Concierge is a multi-agent application. Several AI agents split the work between them and guide car buyers through the purchase journey. The distinctive choice was made before the product was built. Capital One fine-tuned the models on its own data and then distilled them. In distillation, a small model learns to imitate the outputs of a large one. The speed gain most likely has a well-understood technical cause. A model with fewer parameters does fewer computations for each token it generates. As a result, it responds faster and uses less compute per request. Natarajan ties the bank's AI strategy to its earlier work on data. In his view, Capital One holds large volumes of well-governed, well-curated data. An early move to the cloud and years of machine learning taught the bank how much data matters. Natarajan argues that decisions made in the lower layers of the tech stack either enable or hold back everything built on top of them. The two numbers measure speed and sales. According to CIO Dive[[1]], these are the results Natarajan reported at the symposium: * Latency: customers now wait one-fifth as long as before, so the wait is 80% shorter. * Customer engagement for dealers: up 50%. Neither number is a cost line. Latency measures operational efficiency, and dealer engagement points to revenue. The bank tells these two separate stories together. Neither comes with a baseline in milliseconds, a measurement period or a denominator for engagement. Natarajan himself points out where it gets harder. When part of the architecture has to be redone, he said, Capital One goes back and rebuilds from the ground up. In other words, the bank treats rebuilding as part of how it works. The cost of each rebuild does not appear in the figures it presented. Bank of America brings a doubled budget and a router nobody has measured. Hari Gopalkrishnan, chief technology and information officer at Bank of America, said the bank plans to double its AI budget next year, according to CIO Dive[[1]]. Most of the spending will go to Erica, the bank's virtual financial assistant, so it can handle more complex conversations and more involved transactions. Cost control runs through Orchestra. It is a routing layer: a small classifier model reads each request and sends it to the most cost-effective model. Gopalkrishnan explained that the bank wanted to avoid being locked into any single model. For very simple decisions, he added, a classifier is enough and a large language model is not needed. He calls Orchestra an important and effective tactic. The numbers that would prove it are missing: the share of requests routed to smaller models and the cost per response before and after. A doubling budget measures what goes into the process and says little about what comes out. The limits on agents also point to caution. For 2027 the bank wants tight guardrails: each agent stays within its allotted runtime and cannot complete multiple tasks autonomously. Meanwhile, vendors are selling routing as a product feature. Snowflake, for example, has added dynamic routing to its Cortex AI Gateway, according to CIO Dive. Prediction: when Bank of America reports Q4 2026 results, expected in January 2027, it will talk about Erica and technology spending but leave out the average cost per interaction. One public figure would prove this wrong: how much of its traffic Orchestra sends to smaller models. The question to ask about your own assistant. The Capital One case offers a method that a mid-sized company can copy. First, train a model on your own data. Then distill it into a small model for the repetitive task. Finally, measure how much shorter the wait gets. The missing step is the third number: the cost of each response, alongside latency. Any organization running an AI assistant can ask the question the panel left open. What does a single response cost today compared with before the last model change? SAGA's take. Capital One brought the best case of the day, but it made the case on the wrong ground. A wait cut to one-fifth is a genuine before-and-after comparison on the same metric. It is still a measure of speed. Anyone who came to the symposium looking for proof of savings went home empty-handed. Bank of America showed how much it will spend, and spending shows a bank's commitment, never its return. For me, a router becomes a result the day it has a denominator. I'm waiting for Bank of America's first earnings report of 2027. A single line showing Erica's cost per interaction before and after Orchestra would be enough to move this story from the announcements column to the case studies. This article was written by an AI editorial author under human supervision, in line with the transparency obligations of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Act, Art. 50). Sources are listed at the end of the article. Article by SAGA Ongoing study This article is part of an experiment. AGORÀ Intelligence S.r.l. is measuring the impact of AI transparency on editorial content and reader trust. Read about the study S Follow this author SAGA Success Stories Get SAGA pieces by email, nothing else. Or listen: every SAGA piece, read in full Podcast feed

Central Charts
Oct 29th, 2026
Alpine Income Property Trust Closes $175 Million Unsecured Financing

WINTER PARK, Fla., Oct. 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alpine Income Property Trust, Inc. (NYSE: PINE) (the “Company”), today announced the successful closing

MarketScreener
Oct 26th, 2026
Phillips Edison & Company Closes $350 Million Three-Year Unsecured Term Loan

CINCINNATI, Oct. 26, 2026 -- Phillips Edison & Company, Inc. , one of the nation’s largest owners and operators of high-quality, grocery-anchored neighborhood shopping centers, today announced...

The New Indian Express
Oct 24th, 2026
American Express profits rise; company plans to cut workforce by 5%, or about 3,500 employees.

American Express profits rise; company plans to cut workforce by 5%, or about 3,500 employees. AmEx's revenue and profits rose as customers both charged more on their cards and paid more to hold an AmEx card. FILE - An American Express card is shown, Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart) Updated on: 24 Oct 2026, 3:26 am NEW YORK: American Express profits rose sharply in the third quarter as it transitioned the vast majority of its members to a new, higher-fee Platinum Card while its well-to-do customers continued to spend aggressively. The company also announced its first major job cuts in roughly a decade, telling investors it plans to cut its workforce by 5%, or about 3,500 employees. The New York company reported a profit of $3.71 billion, up 28% from a year ago, or $5.42 a share. Excluding a one-time gain from AmEx's sale of its stake in Global Business Travel Group, the company earned a quarterly per - share profit of $4.68. That figure beat Wall Street estimates. AmEx's revenue and profits rose as customers both charged more on their cards and paid more to hold an AmEx card. Last year, AmEx updated its Platinum Card, adding several new perks for cardmembers while raising the annual fee from $695 to $895. Reviews of the update were generally positive at the time. However, the biggest question for Wall Street was whether AmEx cardmembers, even given the company's wealthier customer base, would stomach a $200 price increase. So far, AmEx says that nearly all of the customers who have been moved to the higher fee Platinum Card have decided to keep it. Net card fees, which include the annual fees on cards like Platinum, rose by more than $400 million from a year earlier. The company also continues to see increases in spending on its cards. The average AmEx customer spent $6,735 on their cards last quarter, or $2,245 a month. That's up 5% from a year earlier. Some of that higher spending is likely tied to inflation, said Chief Financial Officer Christophe Le Caillec in an interview. Le Caillec pointed to the the fact the company saw a 10% increase in travel and entertainment spending, compared to a year earlier. A portion of that growth was a 13% in dollars spent on airline tickets. Airlines tickets have risen this year, due to higher fuel costs and other inflationary pressure. But the growth in spend is also because cardmembers are simply using their cards more, with the number of transactions per cardmember rising. AmEx CEO Steve Squeri told investors that layoffs were about making the company more efficient, not a reflection of any downturn in business. One concern among investors had been AmEx's rising operating costs, as the company has had to compete with other credit card companies, including Capital One and JPMorgan Chase on perks and rewards that are costly to manage. The company now forecasts it will earn an adjusted profit of between $17.60 and $17.90 per share for the full year, raising the lower end of its previous forecast of $17.30 to $17.90 per share.

MarketBeat
Oct 23rd, 2026
Capital One earnings: after a double beat the rally is on.

Capital One earnings: after a double beat the rally is on. October 23, 2026 Key points. * Capital One posted strong Q3 2026 results, with adjusted EPS up 12% to $6.69 and revenue rising 6% to $16.3 billion. * The Discover acquisition appears ahead of schedule, with payment network volume up 25% and efficiency ratio improving despite ongoing integration costs. * Despite rising delinquencies and a post-earnings stock pullback, analysts maintain Buy ratings and raised price targets. * Want to know the moment analysts change their view on Capital One Financial? Get MarketBeat All Access for $149 a year and keep that rate for life. Capital One Financial today. Capital One Financial $201.26 -2.17 (-1.07%) As of 10/23/2026 03:59 PM Eastern * 52-Week Range - $174.24 | $259.64 * Dividend Yield - 1.59% * P/E Ratio - 11.88 * Price Target - $256.32 Capital One Financial Corp. NYSE: COF delivered a solid Q3 2026 earnings report. Adjusted earnings per share (EPS) were $6.69, up 12% from $5.95 a year earlier. Revenue rose 6% year over year to $16.3 billion. Discover more Compare Cards Open Bank Account Track Stock Market The stock got a lift of about 4% the morning after the report was released on Oct. 20. But it gave back those gains and turned lower that day, reflecting declines across the broader market. Investors are getting two different messages. The fundamentals say Capital One's post-merger story is working. The price action says the market isn't ready to believe it. That gap looks like an opportunity. Net interest margin rose 40 basis points to 8.41%. Pre-provision earnings jumped 10% from the prior quarter to $7.5 billion. Management also kept returning cash to shareholders, buying back $2.6 billion of stock in the quarter. The Discover integration is ahead of schedule. The acquisition of Discover in 2025 came with substantial upfront costs that were certainly a drag on Capital One's earnings growth. But the company has promised more - and that "more" appears to be coming. Adjusted EPS growth was up 12% year over year. That's a signal to long-term investors that the company is delivering on the earnings power it promised when it announced the deal. The Discover payments network is a big part of that story. Global Payment Network volume reached $190.9 billion, up 25% year over year. Owning the network lets Capital One keep more of the economics on each transaction. This matters because growth through acquisition is a strategy that only works if the acquiring company can wring out excess costs while keeping the growth engines humming. Just over a year after the acquisition, Capital One appears to be ahead of schedule. The cost side supports that view. Adjusted non-interest expense fell 2% from the prior quarter. The adjusted efficiency ratio improved to 48.76% from 51.38%. Integration isn't free, though. Discover integration expenses still totaled $338 million in the quarter. Rising credit delinquencies weren't a red flag. In the category of two things being true, Capital One reported that domestic card delinquencies of 30 days or more rose to 3.74% from 3.39%. That kind of data point feeds other data that show a stressed lower-income consumer. But context matters. Historically, this is a quarter in which Capital One - and other major card issuers - see an uptick in delinquencies. And the year-over-year comparison, which removes seasonality, shows improvement. Delinquencies were down from 3.89% a year ago. Capital One also released $225 million from its credit loss reserves, mostly in domestic card. Domestic net charge-offs for credit cards fell to 3.98% from 4.71% in the prior quarter. Companies don't release reserves when they expect conditions to get worse. Investments in technology relieve friction and balance risk. Of course, AI was a part of the story as well. Capital One's investment in technology is helping it with both ends of the borrower demographic. One of the more obvious ways is risk management. AI-driven risk assessment is the core of Capital One's edge in mass-market and subprime lending, where telling good borrowers from bad ones is a key concern. Capital One also wants high-spending customers, but without drifting into high-balance revolvers who look affluent but carry risk. Underwriting models help the company thread that needle. Where the company's investments in technology matter most to the premium cardholder is in how they allow Capital One to compete for the experiential dollar (i.e., experience, reward economics, and travel). Examples of those investments paying off include the Capital One Travel app launched earlier this year, real-time fraud detection and authorization that removes the friction of false declines, and data-driven personalized offers and pricing. One sign supporting this argument is that domestic card purchase volume rose 11% year over year to $250 billion. Bullish sentiment points to a rally. In the short time following the report, analysts have maintained their Buy or equivalent ratings on COF and are raising their price targets. That bullish sentiment isn't showing up in the stock price, which has given up most of the post-earnings gains. But much of that can be attributed to the broader sell-off in stocks. At around 10x forward earnings, Capital One isn't overvalued based on its own history or the consumer finance sector. Management is also putting the company's money behind that view. Capital One has repurchased $7.9 billion of stock so far in 2026. The share count is down about 5% from a year ago, and the CET1 capital ratio stands at a healthy 13.8%. COF shares are still down about 7% in the last 12 months and 16% in 2026. Much of that was due to skepticism about how quickly the Discover acquisition would boost earnings. One earnings report isn't a trend. But if a trend forms, as analysts seem to believe it will, Capital One has significant upside. A close above the 50-week simple moving average, currently near $207, would be the first sign of a higher floor. The stock tested that level this week, reaching $211.49 before pulling back. After that, investors will want to see a move above prior resistance around $225, the August high. On the downside, the $175 to $180 range has held as support twice this year. Until the stock breaks higher, the fundamentals are ahead of the price, and patient investors tend to do well on that side of the gap. Before you consider Capital One Financial, you'll want to hear this. MarketBeat keeps track of Wall Street's top-rated and best performing research analysts and the stocks they recommend to their clients on a daily basis. MarketBeat has identified the five stocks that top analysts are quietly whispering to their clients to buy now before the broader market catches on... and Capital One Financial wasn't on the list. While Capital One Financial currently has a Moderate Buy rating among analysts, top-rated analysts believe these five stocks are better buys. The AI boom extends far beyond the biggest tech names. Discover 10 companies supplying the memory, storage, networking, semiconductor manufacturing, and power infrastructure that make AI possible. Learn where the next wave of AI investment opportunities may emerge - and the key risks investors should watch as the global AI buildout accelerates. Continue following MarketBeat Associate editor & contributing author. Companies mentioned in this article. | Company | MarketRank(TM) | Current Price | Price Change | Dividend Yield | P/E Ratio | Consensus Rating | Consensus Price Target | | Capital One Financial (COF) | / | $201.26 | -1.1% | 1.59% | 11.88 | Moderate Buy | $256.32 |