Distinguished 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.
About the team:
Our mission in the R2E SRE organization is to protect our customers and our business by building smart systems that can adapt and recover with minimal impact. We are undergoing a massive technical transformation, shifting our approach to reliability from a back-end technical challenge into a front-end customer experience advantage.
On this team, you will help lead the charge in evolving our systems into intelligent co-pilots that go far beyond basic alerting. You will architect solutions that operate at the speed of well-managed systems, focusing on risk, cost, and efficiency to continuously instill engineering excellence.
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:

• Define and implement the multi-year reliability roadmap and target architectural state for the entire product portfolio.
• Invent and deliver novel engineering solutions to reduce organizational toil, maximizing engineering velocity across all services.
• Serve as the final escalation point for system crises, codifying best practices to build an organizational culture of outage prevention.
• Govern secure IaC/Platform strategy, driving enterprise-wide adoption and standardization across multi-cloud environments.
• Establish organization-wide reliability standards and Error Budget governance to align business objectives with engineering risk.
• Lead the growth and technical development of SRE and platform engineering talent across multiple teams and disciplines.
• Establish company-wide FinOps governance and capacity management to ensure sustainable, cost-efficient infrastructure growth.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree.
• At least 7 years of experience in Software, Site Reliability (SRE), and Solution Architecture.
• At least 7 years of experience in Enterprise Architecture, highly available system design, and design patterns.
• At least 5 years of experience in Cloud computing (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)
• At least 5 years of experience in Web technologies (Javascript, TypeScript and SPA frameworks)
• At least 1 year of experience in leading and applying Generative AI/headless AI to enhance automation, code quality or operational workflow

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related field
• 6+ years defining and executing multi-year, organization-wide IaC and CI/CD strategic roadmaps.
• Industry-recognized expert in optimizing hyper-scale distributed systems and advanced cloud-native architectures.
• Executive-level success integrating SRE models (SLOs, Error Budgets) to drive cultural and process transformation across engineering divisions.
• Authority in designing and deploying holistic, cost-optimized observability platforms and advanced, metrics-driven SLO governance.
• Visionary in cloud security, establishing comprehensive security and compliance governance (Zero Trust, Secrets Mgmt).
• Globally recognized contributor to open-source or history of pioneering strategic internal platform innovation.
• Track record of designing, scaling, and operating next-generation platforms, delivering measurable 5-10x reliability and efficiency gains.
• Pioneer experience leveraging Generative/Headless AI to achieve autonomous operations and predictive reliability.

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 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.
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.
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 1-800-304-9102 or via email at [email protected] . 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 [email protected]
Capital One does not provide, endorse nor guarantee and is not liable for third-party products, services, educational tools or other information available through this site.
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).