Sr. Distinguished Engineer

As a Sr. 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 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.

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.

About the Team:
In this role you will partner with Senior Product, Design and Technology Leaders across Capital One, in building a platform that provides our clients with the ability to reimagine how they make inbound card and loan payments. This work spans across the customer experience, payment profiles, scheduling, fulfillment and money movement rails. This is an exciting time to lead the payments work as Capital One leads in innovative new payments capabilities. You'll have the opportunity to work with a best-in-class engineering team, as well as partner across a large portion of technology at Capital One.

Leveraging your technical strengths, creativity and influence, you will create the next generation of payment products with an engineering team of 180+ associates who leverage cutting edge technology in the cloud. The combination of superior technology with customer centric solutions will distance Capital One from other leading technology companies.

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

What you'll do:

• Define and drive technical strategy and roadmap for our systems and platforms that power Capital One's inbound card and loan capabilities across the customer experience, payment profiles, scheduling, fulfillment and money movement rails.
• Partner cross-functionally with client, cloud infrastructure, and machine learning platform teams to align on and co-develop technical solutions.
• Architect and build highly secure & scalable systems that enable server-driven product experiences across devices, with exceptional reliability and availability.
• Design high-throughput, low-latency services capable of handling millions of concurrent requests.
• Design and implement API & federated BFF (Back-end for Front end) strategy for efficient data access (fetching, caching, request coalescing, etc.) between backend services and clients, with democratized data schema contribution.
• Architect enhanced Observability and Monitoring frameworks to enable rapid issue detection, debugging and resolution, across the entire product system stack.
• Provide organizational technical leadership to influence architecture, engineering standards, cross-team strategies, mentoring engineers and driving organization wide platform innovation.
• Leverage proven leadership in driving platform strategy, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and influencing technical direction across the company

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree
• At least 9 years of experience in software engineering
• At least 9 years of experience designing distributed systems, backend architecture, and API platforms
• At least 5 years of experience with public cloud technologies

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related field
• 10+ years of professional experience coding in commonly used languages like Java, Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, Swift,
• 7+ years of experience in event-driven systems and architecting scalable, fault-tolerant, highly-available services
• 7+ years of experience in building high-performance API platforms and federated BFF architectures (GraphQL, REST, API gateways, gRPC, caching, and streaming).
• 7+ years of experience with cloud-native engineering (AWS, Azure, or GCP), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and automated deployment

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 Engineer

McLean, VA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr Distinguished Engineer

New York, NY: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr Distinguished Engineer

Richmond, VA: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr Distinguished Engineer

San Francisco, CA: $343,400 - $392,000 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 ; 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 or via email at 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

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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).