Senior Distinguished Engineer – Automated Governance

Capital One • McLean, VA

7d • $286,200 - $392,000

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. Team Description: In the "One Pipeline" group, we are transforming compliance from a gate into a guarantee. We are seeking a Senior Distinguished Engineer to lead the technical vision for automated governance and software supply chain integrity. This is a role for a systems thinker who sees security and speed as symbiotic. As an individual contributor with enterprise-wide influence, you will engineer the systems that make compliance seamless for developers while maintaining complete auditability for regulators. In a highly regulated environment with multiple federal oversight bodies, the complexity isn't optional—but the friction can be eliminated. Furthermore, you will help shape the governance strategy for emerging frontiers, including agentic systems. As Capital One adopts AI-driven development, you will partner with our Agentic Platform, Risk Management, SDLC Policy, and Cyber teams to ensure we can systematically verify that agentically-produced code meets our quality and compliance standards.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree
• At least 9 years of experience in software engineering, including experience in designing and scaling backend systems, security protocols, or data platform
• At least 7 years of experience building and optimizing resilient, production-critical infrastructure

Nice To Haves

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related field
• 3 + Years of experience in complex regulated environments.
• 2 + year experience designing compliance-as-code or automated governance frameworks that process high volumes (millions of daily validations) at enterprise scale.
• Proven ability to identify systemic risks and drive solutions across organizational boundaries, translating between technical and policy stakeholders

Responsibilities

• Engineer Automated Governance: Lead the strategy for systems that treat compliance as a data problem. You will design frameworks that integrate directly into the developer workflow, ensuring code meets compliance requirements from the moment it's written—without manual intervention.
• Define Agentic Safety: Partner with Agentic Platform and Risk teams to build the verification systems that ensure agentically-produced code meets our quality and compliance bar. You will design the frameworks that maintain perfect traceability of requirements and outcomes, regardless of whether the contributor is human or AI.
• Simplify Regulatory Complexity: Translate complex regulatory requirements into elegant, automated technical solutions. You will build structure in ambiguity, creating systems that satisfy auditors while empowering engineers to move fast.
• Drive Technical Impact: Operate as a hands-on leader, driving the implementation of critical solutions. You will review architectures, design control frameworks, and ensure our tooling meets the highest standards of reliability and performance.
• Bridge Engineering and Risk: Partner with Risk Management, SDLC Policy, Cyber, and Audit teams to align technical strategies with business outcomes. You will ensure our engineering practices remain ahead of the regulatory curve, translating policy requirements into platform capabilities.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level