Staff Software Engineer - Identity

Staff Software Engineer - Identity

As a 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 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 delivering 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 engineers and actively recruiting to keep building our community.

What You Will Lead:

• The Move to Just-In-Time (JIT): Architect the transition away from "permanent access" to a model of zero standing privileges. You will design the systems that enable seamless, automated access elevation and revocation based on real-time necessity.

• Policy-as-Code & Abstraction: Lead the effort to abstract IGA components, moving us toward a centralized, policy-based access model that is agnostic of the underlying stack and highly automated.

• Contextual & Adaptive Security: Design an authorization fabric that factors in multi-dimensional telemetry—including device posture, network risk, and user behavior to make dynamic, risk-based access decisions.

• Engineering Self-Sufficiency: Champion an "Identity-as-a-Service" internal culture, building developer-centric APIs and self-service capabilities that allow our product teams to move fast without compromising our rigorous regulatory guardrails.

• Governance in a Regulated Landscape: Navigate the complexity of a highly regulated financial environment, ensuring that our leap into the future of IAM meets and exceeds the most stringent compliance and audit standards.

The Visionary We Need:

You are a recognized leader in the Identity space who understands that the "Cloud Journey" is only the foundation. You have experience decoupling legacy monoliths, implementing Open Policy Agent (OPA) or similar policy engines, and building resilient, high-scale distributed systems. You don’t just "manage" identity; you treat Identity as the core engine of a modern Zero Trust architecture.

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 materials 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.

What You’ll Do:

• 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

• Drive modernization of monolithic systems into microservice architectures and event-driven platforms

• Collaborate with senior engineering and architecture leaders to define long-term platform strategy and API standards

• Serve as a force-multiplier for the team, balancing deep, hands-on technical contribution and innovation with mentoring and elevating the skills of peers and junior engineers.

• Lead cross-divisional projects and impacts that promote technological best practices and enhancements

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree or higher in Computer Science or a related quantitative field (Statistics, Economics, Operations Research, Analytics, Mathematics, Engineering)

• At least 7 years of experience in all of the following:

• Software engineering and solution architecture

• Enterprise architecture and design patterns

• Cloud computing (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)

• Data architecture

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering

• 10+ years of experience in all of the following:

• Software engineering and solution architecture

• Enterprise architecture and design patterns

• Web technologies (JavaScript, TypeScript and SPA frameworks)

• Designing and building distributed HPC and ML systems

• Cloud computing (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)

• Data architecture

• 10+ years of professional experience coding in commonly used languages like Go, Java, JavaScript/Typescript, Python, Rust, C#, Scala

• 8+ years of experience with database and database management systems

• 10+ years of professional experience in the full lifecycle of system development, from conception through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment and production support

• 8+ years of experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), cloud-based productivity tools, or virtualization technologies

• 10+ years of experience with Networking protocols and integration with third party distributed systems

• 5+ years of experience mentoring senior engineers and driving professional development within technical teams

• 2+ years of experience leading cross-domain architectural reviews and establishing coding and design standards

• Expertise in the strategic application of agentic AI coding tools to solve systemic development challenges

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.

McLean, VA: $269,100 - $307,200 for Staff Full-stack Engineer

Plano, TX: $244,700 - $279,200 for Staff Full-stack Engineer

Richmond, VA: $244,700 - $279,200 for Staff Full-stack 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.

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.

If you have visited our website in search of information on employment opportunities or to apply for a position, and you require an accommodation, please contact Capital One Recruiting at View phone number on click.appcast.io or via email at View email address on click.appcast.io . All information you provide will be kept confidential and will be used only to the extent required to provide needed reasonable accommodations.

For technical support or questions about Capital One's recruiting process, please send an email to View email address on click.appcast.io