Staff Data Engineer — Real-Time AI & Data Platform Lead

Capital One; Wilmington (DE); On-site; USD 245,000 - 279,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One in McLean, VA is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to architect and scale our enterprise data platforms. You will lead end-to-end data strategies, real-time architectures, and AI-enabled analytics across global regions.

You will mentor senior engineers, contribute code and patterns, and drive innovation while upholding privacy by design and secure data practices across the Capital One Tech organization.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or higher in Computer Science or a related quantitative field
• At least 7 years of experience in data engineering
• At least 3 years of experience in data architecture
• At least 2 years of experience building applications in AWS
• At least 5 years of experience programming with Python, Java, or Scala
• At least 5 years of experience designing and developing data pipelines
• At least 3 years of experience in data modeling and end-to-end data solutions using relational and non-relational databases

Responsibilities

• Vision & Strategy: Architect the long-term enterprise roadmap for distributed AI telemetry, streaming data engineering, and automated developer insight frameworks.
• Enterprise Scaling & Telemetry: Lead evolution of internal developer telemetry platform for billions of annual events across global regions.
• ML/AI & Intelligence Layer: Deploy advanced inference capabilities, including LLM-as-a-Judge models, to score code complexity and ROI of generative AI tools.
• Data Engineering & Architecture: Own end-to-end data strategy and real-time event-driven architectures feeding into the enterprise data lake.
• Business Metric Correlation: Link AI code density data with core business outcomes like Feature Lead Time and PR cycle time.
• Risk & Privacy Governance: Enforce privacy-by-design with automated PII masking, token management, and secret filtering.
• Culture & Technical Contribution: Lead through prototyping, evaluating make-vs-buy, authoring code patterns, mentoring engineers.

Skills

Python

Java

Scala

Data engineering

AWS

Data modeling

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Master’s degree (preferred)

Tools

AWS

EMR

Spark

Glue

Databricks

NoSQL databases

Job description

Capital One in McLean, VA is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to architect and scale our enterprise data platforms. You will lead end-to-end data strategies, real-time architectures, and AI-enabled analytics across global regions.

You will mentor senior engineers, contribute code and patterns, and drive innovation while upholding privacy by design and secure data practices across the Capital One Tech organization.