Senior Staff Engineer

About the role

As a Senior Staff 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. You will drive innovation at multiple levels, optimizing business outcomes while delivering strong technology solutions.

You will promote a culture of engineering excellence, mentor internal talent, and actively recruit to build Capital One’s technical community. Staff Engineers are expected to lead through technical contribution, operating as trusted advisors for key technologies, platforms, and capability domains. You will create clear communications, code samples, blog posts, and other materials to share knowledge both inside and outside the organization.

In this role, you will be the technical lead for the Customer Management engineering organization, setting and delivering the technical agenda for foundational platforms and horizontal thread teams (SRE, Sustained Engineering, Data, and Operations). You will manage the entire credit card customer lifecycle—from offer management to retention—ensuring a seamless and delightful experience. You will make credit decisioning and offers real-time and intelligent, leveraging novel data sources, predictive models, and quantitative in-market testing and experimentation.

You will drive an agenda to ship exponentially more products, experiences, and offers by equipping cross-functional partners with GenAI tools, datasets, experimentation frameworks, and configurable/extensible systems that enable self-service product delivery. Your goal is to put more Capital One cards in more wallets. You will lead 100+ engineers across multiple directors, grow high-potential senior leaders, and even found a novel SRE function that raises operational excellence across the entire Customer Management domain.

This is not a pure architecture role; you will work closely with project teams, coding, delivering, optimizing, and operating the systems you design. The ideal candidate excels at surveying broad business domains, crafting technical strategies to support multiple business futures, and diving deep into the details to personally deliver high-leverage projects from that roadmap.

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, such as performance, scalability, and operability
• Continue learning and injecting advanced technical knowledge into the community
• Handle several projects simultaneously, balancing time to maximize impact
• Act as a role model and mentor within the tech community, coaching and strengthening the technical expertise of engineering and product teams
• Partner with product management to set an ambitious roadmap for expanding Capital One’s reach
• Conduct 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 and eliminating duplicative customer experiences across channels
• Stand up and scale a hybrid SRE + Engineering Productivity function supporting the entire Acquisitions engineering org, achieving strong statistical process control and operational maturity
• Design solutions that enable non-technical contributors to design, test, and deliver marketing experiments, UI treatments, and credit offers

Basic Qualifications

• 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

Preferred 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 commonly used languages like Java, Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Swift, etc.
• 10+ years of professional experience in the full lifecycle of system development, from 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 to earn performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives (LTI). Incentives could be discretionary or non-discretionary depending on the plan.