Staff Full-stack Engineer - FS Tech Architecture

About the role

As a Staff Engineer at Capital One, you'll bring deep technical judgment to problems where the stakes are real. In Capital One Auto's innovation space, the "Garage," you're building and evolving the systems that power auto financing and servicing at national scale — loan origination, dealer-facing platforms, and the pipelines that keep millions of customers' loans accurate and available. A consistency bug or an unmaintainable design here isn't just technical debt — it's a loan that posts wrong, a dealer integration that breaks at the worst possible moment, or a system nobody can safely change two years from now.

You'll work inside a fully cloud-native, AWS-based stack alongside engineers, ML practitioners, and product leaders across Capital One who expect you to reason rigorously about scale, failure modes, and long-term maintainability — not just ship working code. And because talent moves across Capital One, you're joining a company-wide community of technical experts, not just a single team's roster.

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
• Rigorously evaluate architectural and design decisions for scalability limits, data consistency tradeoffs, and long-term maintainability before committing to an approach
• 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:
• Web technologies (JavaScript, TypeScript and SPA frameworks)
• Designing and building distributed HPC and ML systems
• 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 with message-oriented middleware and asynchronous, event-driven communication patterns (e.g., pub/sub, queuing, event streaming)
• 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 to perform work within one of these locations, and refers to the amount Capital One is willing to pay at the time of this posting. Salaries for part-time roles will be prorated based upon the agreed upon number of hours to be regularly worked.

Plano, TX: $244,700 - $279,200 for Staff Full-stack Engineer

Pay and benefits

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location, and the actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate’s offer letter.

This role is also eligible to earn performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI). Incentives could be discretionary or non discretionary depending on the plan.

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well-being. Learn more at the Capital One Careers website. Eligibility varies based on full or part-time status, exempt or non-exempt status, and management level.

This role is expected to accept applications for a minimum of 5 business days.

Capital One does not provide, endorse nor guarantee and is not liable for third-party products, services, educational tools or other information available through this site.

Capital One Financial is made up of several different entities. Please note that any position posted in Canada is for Capital One Canada, any position posted in the United Kingdom is for Capital One Europe and any position posted in the Philippines is for Capital One Philippines Service Corp. (COPSSC).