Sr. Staff Cloud Engineer (Cloud Strategy & Innovation)

Sr. Staff Cloud Engineer (Cloud Strategy & Innovation)

Do you love building and pioneering in the technology space? Do you enjoy solving complex business problems in a fast-paced, collaborative, inclusive, and iterative delivery environment? At Capital One, you’ll be part of a big group of makers, breakers, doers and disruptors, who love to solve real problems and meet real customer needs. We are seeking Cloud Engineers who are passionate about marrying data with emerging technologies to join our team. As a Cloud Engineer, you’ll have the opportunity to be on the forefront of driving a major transformation within Capital One.

Cloud Foundations is focused on delivering scalable, secure and flexible cloud infrastructure solutions. We are the bedrock for Capital One, supporting all of our applications and critical systems. We drive the standard patterns and capabilities for cloud infrastructure, delivering those patterns through automated, API-first solutions. Our goal is to provide fully managed infrastructure that can be stood up in real time, delivering on the needs of our customers now and in the future.

In this role, you will drive our cloud infrastructure strategy. This includes areas such as cloud connectivity, automating cloud landing zones, and overall cloud platform management. You will work with other senior leaders in the organization to define our strategy and partner closely with key stakeholders across the enterprise to execute that strategy.

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 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
• Lead the adoption and responsible use of emerging AI and automation capabilities to improve the scalability, reliability, and efficiency of cloud platforms and engineering workflows

• Bachelor’s Degree or higher in Computer Science or a related quantitative field (Statistics, Economics, Operations Research, Analytics, Mathematics, Engineering)
• At least 9 years of experience in software engineering
• At least 6 years of experience in cloud engineering, * Master’s Degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering
• 12+ years of experience in coding with at least one of the following: Java, Scala, Python, Go, or Node.js
• 8+ years of experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI)
• 8+ years of experience in CI/CD orchestration, Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Crossplane), and Automated Governance using Policy-as-Code DSLs (e.g. OPA)
• One or more active certifications related to cloud infrastructure management or security
• Experience in optimizing complex, high-scale distributed systems and cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Serverless)
• Experience designing and supporting cloud networking, security and identity integrations
• Experience troubleshooting and supporting production cloud environments
• Experience influencing technology strategy at the portfolio or business unit level
• Experience managing multi-team engineering organizations or leading strategic technical programs spanning multiple domains
• Experience defining and tracking engineering OKRs that align to business outcomes
• Experience shaping organization design and talent strategy for scaling engineering capabilities
• Experience with strategic and executive-level communication to influence technology decisions within the organization
• Experience in the full lifecycle of system development, from conception through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment and production support
• Experience acting as a leader of leaders and driving professional development within technical teams
• Expertise in the strategic application of agentic AI coding tools to solve systemic development challenges.
• Experience with risk management and operational excellence within high risk/high severity incident environment
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving professional development within technical teams
• Experience leading cross-domain architectural reviews or establishing coding and design standards

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.

McLean, VA: $314,800 - $359,300 for Sr. Staff Cloud Engineer

New York, NY: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Staff Cloud Engineer

Plano, TX: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr. Staff Cloud Engineer

Richmond, VA: $286,200 - $326,700 for Sr. Staff Cloud Engineer

San Francisco, CA: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Staff Cloud Engineer

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., 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).