Sr. Staff Engineer (Reliability Engineering)

Sr. Staff Engineer (Reliability Engineering)
As a Senior Staff Engineer at Capital One, you will be 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 Senior Staff 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 delivering 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 engineers and actively recruiting to keep building our community.
Senior Staff 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 materials 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.
The Resilience Engineering team is dedicated to safeguarding our enterprise critical platforms by preventing, managing, and resolving high-severity technology incidents. In this team, you will serve as the technical authority, providing architectural vision and leading cross-functional teams during critical outages to drastically minimize downtime. Beyond immediate incident response, you will spearhead systemic root cause analyses to ensure underlying architectural weaknesses are fundamentally and permanently resolved. You will proactively define and champion enterprise-wide standards for observability, disaster recovery, and chaos engineering to build a robust, fault-tolerant infrastructure. This is a highly visible, strategic leadership role where your expertise will mentor engineering teams and directly shape the long-term reliability and operational maturity of our entire organization.
What You’ll Do:
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
Drive modernization of monolithic systems into microservice architectures and event-driven platforms
Collaborate with senior engineering and architecture leaders to define long-term platform strategy and API standards
Serve as a force-multiplier for the team, balancing deep, hands-on technical contribution and innovation with mentoring and elevating the skills of peers and junior engineers.
Lead cross-divisional projects and impacts that promote technological best practices and enhancements
Basic Qualifications:
Bachelor's Degree or higher in Computer Science or a related quantitative field (Statistics, Economics, Operations Research, Analytics, Mathematics, Engineering)
At least 9 years of experience in all of the following:
Software engineering and solution architecture
Enterprise architecture and design patterns
Cloud computing (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)
Data architecture
Preferred Qualifications:
Master’s Degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering
12+ years of experience in all of the following:
Software engineering and solution architecture
Enterprise architecture and design patterns
Web technologies (JavaScript, TypeScript and SPA frameworks)
Designing and building distributed HPC and ML systems
Cloud computing (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)
Data architecture
12+ years of professional experience coding in commonly used languages like Go, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Rust, C#, Scala
10+ years of experience with database and database management systems
12+ years of professional experience in the full lifecycle of system development, from conception through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment and production support
10+ years of experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), cloud-based productivity tools, or virtualization technologies
12+ years of experience with Networking protocols and integration with third party distributed systems
7+ years of experience mentoring senior engineers and driving professional development within technical teams
3+ years of experience leading cross-domain architectural reviews or establishing coding and design standards
Expertise in the strategic application of agentic AI coding tools to solve systemic development challenges
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: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr. Staff Full-stack Engineer
Plano, TX: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr. Staff Full-stack Engineer
Richmond, VA: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr. Staff Full-stack 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 inclu