Senior Director, Senior Staff Engineer

As a Senior 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.

Staff Engineers are expected to lead through technical contribution. You will operate as a trusted advisor for our key technologies, platforms and capability domains, creating clear and concise communications, code samples, blog posts and other material to share knowledge both inside and outside the organization. You will specialize in a particular subject area, but your input and impact will be sought and expected throughout the organization.

In this role, you will be the technical lead for the Customer Management engineering organization, setting and delivering the technical agenda for the 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 & offers real time and intelligent, spanning dynamic credit offers, line, balance transfer, 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 arming cross-functional partners with GenAI tools, datasets, experimentation frameworks, and configurable/extensible systems that allow for self-service product delivery. All with one overarching goal: 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 and you will work elbow-to-elbow with project teams coding, delivering, optimizing and operating the systems you design. The ideal candidate will excel at both surveying broad business domains, crafting a technical strategy to support the many possible futures of the business, and diving deep into the details and personally delivering the highest-leverage projects from that roadmap.

If you are ready to provide thought leadership and build engineering excellence across Capital One's engineering teams, come join us in our mission to change banking for good.

Key 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 our community
• Handle several projects simultaneously, balancing your time to maximize impact
• Act as a role model and mentor within the tech community, helping to coach and strengthen the technical expertise and know-how of our engineering and product community
• Partner with product management to set an ambitious roadmap for expanding Capital One’s reach.
• 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 — not just take tickets
• 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

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

The minimum and maximum full-time annual salaries for this role are listed below, by location. Please note that this salary information is solely for candidates hired to perform work within one of these locations, and refers to the amount Capital One is willing to pay at the time of this posting. Salaries for part-time roles will be prorated based upon the agreed upon number of hours to be regularly worked.

Chicago, IL: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr Distinguished EngineerMcLean, VA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr Distinguished EngineerRichmond, 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, 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.

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

This role is expected to accept applications for a minimum of 5 business days. No agencies please.

Capital One is an equal opportunity employer (EOE, including disability/vet) committed to non-discrimination in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Capital One promotes a drug-free workplace. Capital One will consider for employment qualified applicants with a criminal history in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable laws regarding criminal background inquiries, including, to the extent applicable, Article 23-A of the New York Correction Law; San Francisco, California Police Code Article 49, Sections 4901-4920; New York City’s Fair Chance Act; Philadelphia’s Fair Criminal Records Screening Act; and other applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations regarding criminal background inquiries.

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Capital One Financial is made up of several different entities. Please note that any position posted in Canada is for Capital One Canada, any position posted in the United Kingdom is for Capital One Europe and any position posted in the Philippines is for Capital One Philippines Service Corp. (COPSSC).