Staff Software Engineer - Identity

Staff Software Engineer - Identity
As a 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 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.
What You Will Lead:
The Move to Just-In-Time (JIT): Architect the transition away from "permanent access" to a model of zero standing privileges. You will design the systems that enable seamless, automated access elevation and revocation based on real-time necessity.
Policy-as-Code & Abstraction: Lead the effort to abstract IGA components, moving us toward a centralized, policy-based access model that is agnostic of the underlying stack and highly automated.
Contextual & Adaptive Security: Design an authorization fabric that factors in multi-dimensional telemetry—including device posture, network risk, and user behavior—to make dynamic, risk-based access decisions.
Engineering Self-Sufficiency: Champion an "Identity-as-a-Service" internal culture, building developer-centric APIs and self-service capabilities that allow our product teams to move fast without compromising our rigorous regulatory guardrails.
Governance in a Regulated Landscape: Navigate the complexity of a highly regulated financial environment, ensuring that our leap into the future of IAM meets and exceeds the most stringent compliance and audit standards.
The Visionary We Need: You are a recognized leader in the Identity space who understands that the "Cloud Journey" is only the foundation. You have experience decoupling legacy monoliths, implementing Open Policy Agent (OPA) or similar policy engines, and building resilient, high-scale distributed systems. You don’t just "manage" identity; you treat Identity as the core engine of a modern Zero Trust architecture.
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.
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 7 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
10+ 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
10+ years of professional experience coding in commonly used languages like Go, Java, JavaScript/Typescript, Python, Rust, C#, Scala
8+ years of experience with database and database management systems
10+ years of professional experience in the full lifecycle of system development, from conception through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment and production support
8+ years of experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), cloud-based productivity tools, or virtualization technologies
10+ years of experience with Networking protocols and integration with third party distributed systems
5+ years of experience mentoring senior engineers and driving professional development within technical teams
2+ years of experience leading cross-domain architectural reviews and 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