Distinguished Software Engineer

Capital One; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One is seeking a Distinguished Engineer in Solutions Engineering to serve as the technical cornerstone of Bank Tech's internal professional services organization, working across domains and technology stacks to accelerate critical initiatives. You will mentor ~30 engineers, shape technical strategy, and drive architecture decisions across payments, observability, cloud, ML, and more.

You will lead hands‑on contributions, build trusted relationships with senior leaders, and communicate

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience with AWS cloud computing.
• Experience across multiple technical domains or consulting.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands‑on technical contributions across engagements, including architecture decisions and code reviews.
• Define and drive technical direction across multiple domains and teams.
• Mentor and grow engineers across teams and lead technical decisions.
• Communicate strategy, risks, and trade‑offs to stakeholders.

Skills

Cross-domain collaboration

Mentoring

Technical leadership

Stakeholder communication

SWAT-style problem solving

Software engineering

Education

Bachelor's Degree in CS or related field

Master's Degree in CS (preferred)

Tools

AWS

Fargate

Lambda

Observability platforms

ML/AI pipelines

Job description

As a Distinguished Engineer in Solutions Engineering, you will be the technical cornerstone of Bank Tech's internal professional services organization — a team that deploys cross‑domain expertise to accelerate the bank's most critical initiatives. Unlike other roles embedded in a single product, you will operate across multiple domains, teams, and technology stacks simultaneously, building trusted relationships with senior leaders and serving as the technical authority on our engagements.

Our team works on integration, modernization, reliability, automated testing, and machine learning. You will shape technical strategy across these engagements while mentoring a team of ~30 engineers spanning full‑stack development, Cloud/DevOps, SRE, and AI/ML.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide hands‑on technical contributions across active engagements, including architecture decisions, code reviews, prototypes, and proof‑of‑concepts.
• Define and drive technical direction for engagements spanning multiple domains (payments, account servicing, observability, cloud infrastructure, ML).
• Decompose complex, ambiguous problems into practical solutions with clear milestones and exit criteria.
• Ensure non‑functional quality across engagements: performance, scalability, operability, and security.
• Make pragmatic technology choices that balance engineering ideals with delivery timelines.
• Build and maintain trusted advisor relationships with VPs, Senior Directors, and engineering leaders across the organization.
• Communicate technical strategy, risks, and trade‑offs clearly to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Navigate organizational complexity, understand decision processes, and influence teams to unblock delivery.
• Represent Solutions Engineering credibility in intake conversations, helping sponsors understand possibilities and scoping engagements realistically.
• Partner with receiving teams during knowledge transfer to ensure clean handovers and long‑term ownership.
• Develop deep knowledge of the bank’s systems landscape and leverage that to identify risks, dependencies, and integration challenges.
• Stay current on bank‑wide technical strategy and translate that into actionable guidance for engagement teams.
• Mentor and grow engineers across multiple teams, building a bench of technical leaders who can own engagements independently.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, continuous learning, and knowledge sharing.
• Lead by example through high‑quality technical contributions, clear documentation, and principled decision‑making.
• Actively recruit and develop talent suited to the unique demands of a professional services engineering model.
• Operate effectively in a SWAT‑style model: rapidly orient to new problem domains, deliver high‑impact contributions in compressed timelines, then transition cleanly to the next priority.
• Balance multiple concurrent engagements, allocating time to maximize organizational impact.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree.
• At least 7 years of experience in software engineering.
• At least 7 years of experience with cloud computing (AWS).
• At least 5 years of experience working across multiple technical domains or in a consulting or professional services engineering capacity.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience with broad exposure across distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and application development.
• 10+ years of professional experience in Java, Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, or similar.
• 8+ years of full‑lifecycle system development – conception through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, and production support.
• Experience at Capital One or a large financial institution with understanding of regulated environments, compliance requirements, and enterprise‑scale systems.
• Demonstrated track record of building relationships and influencing technical decisions across organizational boundaries without direct authority.
• Experience leading technical direction in a consulting, professional services, or rotational engineering model where context‑switching across domains is the norm.
• Experience with serverless architectures (e.g., Fargate, Lambda), event‑driven systems, observability platforms, ML/AI pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and cloud migration at scale.
• Experience leveraging interactive AI tooling to accelerate productivity and utilizing capabilities beyond basic code completion.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills – ability to produce clear ADRs, technical briefs, and stakeholder‑facing materials.

What Sets This Role Apart

• Preference for breadth and variety over deep single‑product ownership – you will work across payments, cloud infrastructure, testing, observability, and ML in a single quarter.
• Energy derived from building relationships and earning trust with stakeholders as much as writing code.
• Excels at rapid context switching – onboarding to a new domain in days, not months.
• Provides outsized organizational impact; technical decisions shape the bank’s most critical initiatives.

Capital One may sponsor a qualified applicant for employment authorization.

Capital One offers comprehensive benefits and is an equal‑opportunity employer (EOE, including disability and veteran status) committed to non-discrimination in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.