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. Staff Engineers are recognized experts in their domains, devising practical and reusable solutions to complex problems while driving innovation at multiple levels to optimize business outcomes and strong technology solutions.

You will promote a culture of engineering excellence, balancing technical leadership with an inclusive environment where diverse ideas are heard and championed. You will lead the way in developing next-generation talent, mentoring internal engineers and actively recruiting to grow the Capital One Tech 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—to ensure a seamless and delightful experience. You will make credit decisioning and offers real-time and intelligent, spanning dynamic credit offers, line increases, balance transfers, product upgrades, retention offers leveraging novel data sources and predictive models, as well as 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, with the overarching goal of putting more Capital One cards in more wallets. You will lead 100+ engineers across multiple directors, grow high-potential senior leaders, and even establish a novel SRE function that elevates 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 strategy to support multiple possible futures, and diving deep into the details to personally deliver the highest-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
• Perform 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

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 such as Java, Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Swift, etc.
• 10+ years of professional experience across 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

Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.

Pay

Annual full-time salary ranges by location (candidates hired to perform work within one of these locations):

• 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. The actual annualized salary amount offered will be reflected in the candidate’s offer letter. This role is eligible to earn performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long-term incentives (LTI). Incentives could be discretionary or non-discretionary depending on the plan.