Staff Engineer

Distinguished Engineer

As a Distinguished 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 Distinguished 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.

Distinguished Engineers are expected to lead through technical contribution. You will lead through direct technical contribution: prototyping new features and systems, acting as a trusted advisor for key technologies, shaping our future architecture & evaluating what systems to build vs buy, and sharing knowledge internally and externally. Additionally, you will promote engineering excellence, foster an inclusive environment, and deeply mentor the next generation of technical talent.

In this role, you will lead the strategy, roadmap, and execution for next-generation CI/CD pipelines, microservices architectures, and AI-augmented developer tooling. You will champion the transition toward Intent-Driven Infrastructure —leveraging AI and automation to allow engineers to declare what they need, leaving the underlying platform to securely determine how to provision and optimize it.

This is a high-visibility, executive-influencing role. You will bridge the gap between deep technical implementation and business value, partnering closely with internal engineering communities, Cyber, Risk, and Executive Leadership to build a highly secure, developer-centric, and well-managed ecosystem that aggressively lowers Feature Lead Time.

Key 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, Cross plane, 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.