Staff Engineer

About the role

As a Staff Engineer at Capital One, you will be a part of a community of technical experts working to define the future of banking in the cloud. You will work alongside our talented team of developers, machine learning experts, product managers and people leaders. Our Staff Engineers are leading experts in their domains, helping devise practical and reusable solutions to complex problems. You will drive innovation at multiple levels, helping optimize business outcomes while driving towards strong technology solutions. At Capital One, we believe diversity of thought strengthens our ability to influence, collaborate and provide the most innovative solutions across organizational boundaries. You will promote a culture of engineering excellence, and strike the right balance between lending expertise and providing an inclusive environment where the ideas of others can be heard and championed. You will lead the way in creating next-generation talent for Capital One Tech, mentoring internal talent and actively recruiting to keep building our community.

Responsibilities

• Vision & Strategy: Architect the long-term enterprise roadmap for modern DevOps practices, intent-driven cloud infrastructure, and next-generation CI/CD frameworks.
• AI Tooling & Integration: Spearhead the evaluation, customization, and deployment of secure AI-assisted software development tools (e.g., automated code generation, smart test-suites, AI Hub extensions, and automated vulnerability scanning).
• Executive Influence & Collaboration: Act as a trusted advisor to technical executives and Line of Business leaders. Effectively articulate technical strategies, ROI, and risk-mitigation frameworks to non-technical stakeholders to secure funding and drive behavioral change across organizations.
• Inner sourcing & Governance: Design and govern multi-tenant core-skills repositories and enterprise marketplaces, enabling local domain teams to safely configure and contribute extensions while maintaining rigorous security standards.
• Microservices & Resiliency: Oversee the scalability, performance, and security of highly distributed microservices environments operating within strict regulatory and cybersecurity boundaries.
• Culture & Mentorship: Foster an inclusive engineering culture centered on a "fail-fast but securely" mentality. Mentor principal and senior engineers, raising the bar for technical excellence across the enterprise.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree
• At least 7 years of experience in software engineering, cloud architecture, or infrastructure engineering.
• At least 5 years of experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines and DevOps toolchains.
• At least 4 years of experience with containerization and microservices orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker) in a cloud-native environment (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related engineering discipline.
• 6+ years of experience designing Intent-Driven Infrastructure or declarative configuration platforms (e.g., advanced Terraform, Crossplane, or custom control planes) that decouple developer intent from infrastructure management.
• 3+ years of experience in a technical leadership role directly influencing VP/SVP/Executive stakeholders on multi-million dollar technology initiatives.
• 3+ years of experience in AI Augmented Software Development using AI Coding Assistant Tools, Spec Driven Development.
• 5+ years of experience within compliance, data privacy, and cybersecurity constraints of a highly regulated environment. Experience co-authoring risk assessments alongside Cyber and Risk teams.
• 5+ years of experience in establishing inner-source strategy frameworks, governing shared Git repositories, and defining tight developer feedback loops (including defining rigid SLAs for platform blockers).
• 5+ years of experience using advanced engineering telemetry systems to correlate technical platform upgrades directly to business metrics like Feature Lead Time (FLT) and deployment frequency.

Pay

Salaries for full-time roles are listed below by location. Salaries for part-time roles will be prorated based upon the agreed upon number of hours to be regularly worked.

• McLean, VA: $269,100 – $307,200 for Distinguished Engineer
• New York, NY: $293,600 – $335,100 for Distinguished Engineer
• Richmond, VA: $244,700 – $279,200 for Distinguished Engineer

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location, and the actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate’s offer letter.

This role is also 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.