Distinguished Software Engineer - Bank Tech

Capital One•McLean, VA

About The Position

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 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 work with our Platform Engineering organization to provide AI-enabled tools for pipeline optimization and deterministic transformation capabilities that dramatically improve developer workflow, quality, and reliability. 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: The Capital One Marketing Technology organization manages our high-scale audience segmentation, campaign management, Ads, and incentive engines, delivering the real-time decisioning, personalization and experimentation platforms required to drive new customer acquisitions and deposits growth. We are seeking a Distinguished Engineer, a hands-on technical leader with a "scale-first" mindset, to bridge the gap between lines of business and our unified enterprise infrastructure. You will use your experience in building high-availability, high-performance systems to architect platform tools that support 18–20 concurrent strategic initiatives, ranging from multi-channel social integrations to complex referral and cash-incentive engines. Your expertise in cloud-native architectures, AI-enabled CI/CD optimization, and deterministic code transformation will be critical as we scale to handle 120M+ customers and 1B+ daily decisions. Your ability to standardize fragmented tech stacks and champion engineering excellence will provide the technical lighthouse necessary to navigate the "canyon crossing" toward our future-state cloud environment. What you’ll do: Architect and operationalize high-scale platform tools and decisioning engines capable of supporting 120M+ customers and scaling to 4x deposit growth in the years to come while bridging fragmented LOB architectures into a unified enterprise cloud environment. Engineer AI-enabled developer workflows and standardized CI/CD pipelines that leverage deterministic code transformation to eliminate technical debt and accelerate the delivery of complex marketing incentive and referral systems. Engineer systemic improvements for operational excellence including automating KTLO (Keep The Lights On) workflows Direct the technical execution of a diverse project portfolio, collaborating with developers specializing in everything ranging from distributed microservices to running large foundation models Work cross-functionally with product and program management disciplines, and stakeholder and partners across Capital One to help optimize business outcomes while driving towards strong technology solutions Share your passion for staying on top of tech trends, experimenting with and learning new technologies, participating in internal & external technology communities, and leading system design and code review sessions Help elevate the Capital One Distinguished Engineering community and establish yourself as a go-to resource on given technologies and technology-enabled capabilities Lead the way in creating next-generation talent, mentoring internal talent and actively recruiting external talent to bolster the Capital One tech talent pool

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree
At least 7 years of experience in software engineering
At least 7 years of experience designing distributed systems, backend architecture, and API platforms
At least 5 years of experience with public cloud technologies

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related field.
10+ years of hands-on experience developing and architecting solutions on AWS.
Relevant professional certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional or Snowflake/Databricks certifications (e.g., Certified SnowPro Advanced Architect).
10+ years of professional experience coding in commonly used languages like Java, Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Swift, etc.
8+ years of professional experience in the full lifecycle of system development, from conception through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment and production support.
Experience in applying Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning concepts to engineering challenges (e.g., anomaly detection, test optimization, intelligent testing).
Deep practical knowledge of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, chaos engineering, and advanced Observability tooling (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Tracing).
Experience leveraging interactive AI tooling to accelerate productivity, utilizing capabilities beyond basic code completion

Responsibilities

Build awareness, increase knowledge and drive adoption of modern technologies, sharing consumer and engineering benefits to gain buy-in
Strike the right balance between lending expertise and providing an inclusive environment where others’ ideas can be heard and championed; leverage expertise to grow skills in the broader Capital One team
Promote a culture of engineering excellence, using opportunities to reuse and innersource solutions where possible
Effectively communicate with and influence key stakeholders across the enterprise, at all levels of the organization
Operate as a trusted advisor for a specific technology, platform or capability domain, helping to shape use cases and implementation in an unified manner
Lead the way in creating next-generation talent for Tech, mentoring internal talent and actively recruiting external talent to bolster Capital One’s Tech talent