Senior Director, Data Platforms & ML Systems

Capital One National Association; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 315,000 - 359,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One seeks a Senior Director, Data Engineer in McLean, VA to lead a 50+ person organization spanning Data Engineering, ML, Generative AI, and Security Products. You will define multi-year platform strategy, own architecture decisions, and drive high-impact data solutions in a enterprise-scale environment.

You will partner with product managers, data scientists and executives to deliver scalable data platforms in the cloud, while advancing governance, performance and resilience across the

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related quantitative field.
• At least 9 years of experience in data engineering.
• At least 7 years of people management experience.
• At least 7 years of experience programming with Python, Java, or Scala.
• At least 5 years of experience driving technical delivery of roadmap features.
• At least 6 years of experience designing and developing data pipelines.
• At least 4 years of experience in data modeling and designing end-to-end data solutions using relational and non-relational databases.
• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or a related field (preferred).
• 12+ years of application development with Python, SQL, Scala, or Java (preferred).
• 8+ years cloud data workloads (AWS, Azure, GCP) (preferred).
• 8+ years distributed data workloads (EMR, Spark, Glue, Databricks) (preferred).
• 8+ years real-time or streaming data pipelines (preferred).
• 6+ years data observability or orchestration tools (preferred).
• 8+ years NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB) (preferred).
• 8+ years data warehousing (Snowflake, Redshift) (preferred).
• 6+ years Agile (preferred).
• 6+ years data products (preferred).
• 5+ years Data Governance (preferred).

Responsibilities

• Own the enterprise strategy and multi-year roadmap for identity analytics, access decisioning, and AI/ML security platforms.
• Lead and grow a 50+ person organization across Data Engineering, ML, Generative AI, and Security Products.
• Set technical direction hands-on. Review architectures, model designs, and system trade-offs.
• Architect low-latency, event-driven systems for real-time identity decisioning and threat detection.
• Design, build, and maintain robust ML infrastructure and pipelines supporting end-to-end workflows.
• Drive the evolution of MLOps practices through automated, metrics-backed deployment workflows.
• Build the intelligence layer for agentic and non-human identity combining behavioral analytics and context graphs.
• Apply state-of-the-art LLM and GenAI techniques in production for threat-intelligence summarization and adaptive access-policy recommendations.
• Operate an automated governance function with pipelines from enterprise and IGA platforms and implement NIST controls.
• Lead enterprise readiness for emerging cyber risk posed by frontier AI models and agentic attack patterns.

Skills

Python

Java

Scala

Data Engineering

Leadership

Cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related quantitative field

Master’s Degree (preferred)

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

EMR

Spark

Glue

Databricks

Job description

Capital One seeks a Senior Director, Data Engineer in McLean, VA to lead a 50+ person organization spanning Data Engineering, ML, Generative AI, and Security Products. You will define multi-year platform strategy, own architecture decisions, and drive high-impact data solutions in a enterprise-scale environment.

You will partner with product managers, data scientists and executives to deliver scalable data platforms in the cloud, while advancing governance, performance and resilience across the