Senior Distinguished Engineer

As a Sr. Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, you will be part of a community of technical experts working to define the future of banking in the cloud. You will collaborate with developers, machine learning experts, product managers, and people leaders to devise practical and reusable solutions to complex problems. This role drives innovation at multiple levels, optimizing business outcomes while advancing strong technology solutions. You will promote a culture of engineering excellence, balancing expertise with inclusivity to champion diverse ideas.

About the Role

You will lead the technical agenda for the Customer Management engineering organization, focusing on foundational platforms and horizontal thread teams (SRE, Sustained Engineering, Data, and Operations). Your work will span the entire credit card customer lifecycle—from offer management to retention—ensuring a seamless and delightful experience. Key initiatives include making credit decisioning and offers real-time and intelligent, leveraging novel data sources, predictive models, and quantitative in-market testing. You will also drive the adoption of GenAI tools, datasets, experimentation frameworks, and configurable systems to enable self-service product delivery, with the goal of expanding Capital One’s reach.

This role involves leading 100+ engineers across multiple directors, mentoring high-potential leaders, and founding a novel SRE function to elevate operational excellence. You will work hands-on with project teams, coding, delivering, optimizing, and operating the systems you design. The ideal candidate excels at both crafting broad technical strategies and diving deep into high-leverage projects.

Responsibilities

• Articulate and evangelize a bold technical vision for your domain.
• Decompose complex problems into practical and operational solutions.
• Ensure the quality of technical design and implementation.
• Serve as an authoritative expert on non-functional system characteristics (performance, scalability, operability).
• Inject advanced technical knowledge into the community through continuous learning.
• Manage multiple projects simultaneously, maximizing impact.
• Act as a role model and mentor, strengthening the technical expertise of engineers and product teams.
• Partner with product management to set an ambitious roadmap for expanding Capital One’s reach.
• Engage in hands-on full-stack coding (frontend, backend, data processing, automation).
• Lead the multi-year strategy to decommission legacy systems and converge the destination stack, reducing maintenance overhead.
• Stand up and scale a hybrid SRE + Engineering Productivity function to achieve operational maturity.
• Design solutions enabling non-technical contributors to deliver marketing experiments, UI treatments, and credit offers.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree.
• At least 9 years of experience in software engineering and solution architecture.
• At least 9 years of experience in enterprise architecture and design patterns.
• At least 9 years of experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, and SPA frameworks.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, distributed systems architecture, or platform engineering.
• 5+ years of experience leading large-scale engineering organizations (50+ engineers across multiple management layers).
• Deep experience with API design, microservices architecture, and platform evolution in high-availability, high-throughput environments.
• Experience founding or leading SRE/production excellence functions, including SLO management, incident response, and reliability engineering.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with product management and business stakeholders to co-own product strategy.
• Track record of decommissioning legacy systems and executing large-scale migrations without disrupting production traffic or team morale.
• 10+ years of professional experience coding in languages like Java, Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Swift.
• 10+ years of experience in the full lifecycle of system development (conception through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, and production support).
• 3+ years of experience with public or private cloud technologies.

Pay

• Chicago, IL: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr Distinguished Engineer.
• McLean, VA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr Distinguished Engineer.
• Richmond, VA: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr Distinguished Engineer.

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location. This role is also eligible for performance-based incentive compensation, including cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives (LTI).

Benefits

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial, and other benefits that support total well-being. Eligibility varies based on full or part-time status, exempt or non-exempt status, and management level.