Staff Software Engineer - Identity

Capital One; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One is seeking a Staff Software Engineer in Identity to lead architectural direction and implementation of identity solutions in a cloud-native environment. You will drive policy-driven security, advocate for zero-trust principles, and mentor engineers across product teams.

You will shape how Capital One transitions legacy systems toward modern IAM, collaborating with ML, product, and people leadership to deliver secure, scalable platforms.

Qualifications

• Seasoned technical leader with identity domain expertise.
• Experience implementing zero-trust architectures and policy engines.
• Strong background in scalable, distributed systems and cloud-native design.

Responsibilities

• Articulate a bold technical vision for IAM and security domains.
• Decompose complex identity problems into practical, scalable solutions.
• Ensure high-quality design and robust implementation across services.
• Serve as an authoritative expert on performance, scalability and operability.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to internal knowledge sharing.

Skills

Identity

Zero Trust

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Tools

Open Policy Agent

Job description

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