Senior Manager, SRE Risk Advisory and Oversight

Capital One•McLean, VA

About The Position

Technology & Data Risk Management (TDRM) is a small organization that packs a big punch. The ~200 professionals in TDRM are trusted experts who oversee ~14,000 developers at Capital One. We raise the bar for excellence in cybersecurity, reliability, tech risk, and data management risk. We shape strategy and decisions, challenge activities to ensure they meet our standards, and perform independent tests of our security and technology risk. For years, the cybersecurity community has debated whether the CISO should report to the CIO or not. In regulated financial services, the answer is: both. The first-line CISO has operational responsibilities and reports to the CIO. The second-line Chief Tech Risk Officer (CTRO) and the Tech & Data Risk Management (TDRM) organization have broader responsibilities for cybersecurity but also reliability, software quality, resilience, and the risk of failing to manage our data. The CTRO is independent and oversees the work of the CISO, the CIO/CTO, and the Chief Data Officer. The CTRO reports to the Chief Risk Officer, who reports directly to the CEO. Our business leaders must constantly make technology decisions. TDRM makes sure they have the tech and data risk information they need to make good decisions. Associates within TDRM are highly-skilled information security, cybersecurity, site reliability engineering, technology, data analyst, data scientist, and risk management professionals. They have a wealth of experience and a demonstrated ability to add value with their advice and to deliver high-impact results. As the Senior Manager, SRE Risk Advisory and Oversight , you will play a key role in providing technical leadership, subject matter expertise, and effective challenge over the enterprise's software engineering and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. You will leverage your deep engineering background and modern technical skills—including leveraging Gen AI tooling and automation—to ensure our customer experiences remain seamless and highly reliable. You will provide subject matter expertise, oversight, and effective challenge of key Technology areas such as cloud services, enterprise architecture, cloud migrations, and overall technology deployments. As part of the Second Line of Defense, this position will also collaborate closely with associates in first line Technology, the Lines of Business, as well as other Second Line of Defense risk management offices to perform and support evaluations of the effectiveness of the company’s resilience posture and offer independent advice and recommendations regarding ways to further mature resilience capabilities.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree or military experience
At least 6 years of experience managing, consulting, auditing, or working in the fields of software engineering, site reliability engineering, or information technology
At least 3 years of experience with cloud implementations (AWS, GCP, Azure)
At least 2 years of experience with open-source programming languages

Nice To Haves

Master’s Degree in Computer Science or an Engineering discipline
Professional certification (AWS Cloud Practitioner, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AWS SysOps Administrator)
Demonstrated understanding of cloud-native and container stacks
Experience with enterprise monitoring, observability, and alerting toolsets (Splunk, Prometheus, Datadog, ELK, PagerDuty)
Proven experience drafting analytical assessments or technical white papers for senior executives and decision-makers
Ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment, taking a lead advisory role on high-visibility resilience initiatives
Prior experience working in financial services or another highly-regulated sector

Responsibilities

Provide Risk Advisory & Technical Leadership: Deliver independent, advisory-based technical leadership when assessing the design, development, and scalability of cloud-native systems against SRE best practices and enterprise risk appetites.
Provide Effective Challenge: Evaluate proposed and current cloud engineering practices, ensuring robust strategies are in place for automation, resiliency, performance, and monitoring.
SRE Subject Matter Expertise: Act as a trusted advisor on core SRE pillars, advising teams on the maturity of their Service Level Indicators/Objectives (SLIs/SLOs), error budgeting, toil reduction, and release engineering (CI/CD) pipelines.
Drive Modern Tech & AI Integration: Keep up-to-date with cutting-edge technology, standards, and tools—specifically cloud-native architectures, containerization, and the integration of emerging AI/ML technologies to optimize reliability and automation.
Perform Independent Assessments: Conduct independent risk reviews of cloud infrastructure, software delivery lifecycles, and observability architectures to identify systemic resilience risks.
Executive Communication & Reporting: Draft and publish independent, data-driven risk materials for senior management and executives, translating complex engineering risks into clear business implications.
Stakeholder Engagement: Build strong, collaborative relationships with first-line engineering leaders, product managers, and architects to communicate technology risks effectively and drive consensus on risk-mitigation strategies.