Senior Staff Full-stack Engineer, Global Payments Network

Senior Staff Full-stack Engineer, Global Payments Network
Capital One has grown from a promising credit card startup into a Fortune 100 company. Our businesses span Card, Retail Banking, Commercial Banking, and Financial Services, backed by an Enterprise Services group that is Capital One's digital and technology backbone.
Within that enterprise, the Global Payment Network (GPN) is one of the company's most ambitious builds: the unification of three legacy networks - Discover Network, PULSE, and Diners Club International - into a single, modern payment network. Rather than three separate acceptance footprints, three separate data models, and three separate operating teams, GPN is being rebuilt from a clean sheet so that a card issued anywhere on the network works everywhere on the network. This is the kind of ground-up platform build most engineers only read about - a chance to define how data moves through one of the largest payment networks in the world, not maintain what's already there.
What You'll Do:
The Senior Staff Full-stack Engineer (IC) for GPN will be responsible for architecting and delivering the real-time and batch data infrastructure that every other team on the network builds on - ingestion, streaming, the canonical data model, and the catalog and metadata layer that gives the network a single source of truth. This role sits at the cross-section of Core Network, Fraud/AML, Analytics, and the Modeling teams building on top of this data, and offers the rare opportunity to define how a payment network's data platform gets built from the ground up rather than inheriting one. A deep understanding of distributed systems, real-time streaming architecture, data modeling at scale, and cloud infrastructure is required. This is a highly visible and influential individual-contributor role, with no direct reports, that requires a combination of deep technical skill, setting vision and architecture, and effective partnership across engineering, data science, product, and risk.
Key Responsibilities:

• Architect the real-time, event-driven data pipelines that move authorization, transaction, settlement, and fraud-relevant events across the network with the latency and exactly-once delivery guarantees a payment network requires - this is not a dashboard-refresh pipeline, it is infrastructure fraud and risk decisioning will run on.
• Define the canonical data model that reconciles three legacy schemes - each with its own merchant hierarchies, participant identities, and transaction semantics - into one shared model, with legacy formats translated at the network's edge only, never propagated inward.
• Design and build the catalog and metadata layer (schema registry, lineage, data contracts, access policy) that gives every downstream team - fraud models, analytics, canonical modeling - one trustworthy source of truth instead of each team reverse-engineering its own.
• Set the technical architecture and standards for streaming, storage, and low-latency serving at network scale, and serve as an evangelist for data standardization both internally and with the partner teams building on this platform.
• Operate as the deep technical authority and trusted advisor across the data engineering function, reimagining what a modern, portable data platform should look like - favoring open, well-understood components over one-off tooling, so the platform is something new engineers can reason about on day one.
• Partner directly with Fraud/AML, Analytics, and Canonical Modeling leadership so your architecture directly unblocks their roadmaps rather than trailing behind them.
• Mentor and raise the technical bar for engineers across the organization, acting as a force multiplier on a brand-new network build without owning a reporting chain of your own.

Basic Qualifications:

• 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 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
• 12+ years of experience in all of the following:
  • Software engineering and solution architecture
  • Enterprise architecture and design patterns
  • Web technologies (JavaScript, TypeScript and SPA frameworks)
  • Designing and building distributed HPC and ML systems
  • Cloud computing (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)
  • Data architecture
• Deep experience designing event-driven, real-time streaming architectures at scale (e.g. Kafka, Flink, or equivalent)
• Experience with distributed storage, catalog, and metadata/lineage systems (e.g. Iceberg, data lakehouse architectures)
• Experience designing canonical or shared data models that unify disparate or legacy systems
• Experience architecting high-availability, low-latency distributed systems in a regulated, high-stakes domain (payments, fraud, financial transaction processing, or similar)

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 Full-stack Engineer
New York, NY: $343,400 - $392,000 for Sr. Staff Full-stack 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.
This role is expected to accept applications for a minimum of 5 business days.
No agencies please. Capital One is an equal opportunity employer (EOE, including disability/vet) committed to non-discrimination in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Capital One promotes a drug-free workplace. Capital One will consider for employment qualified applicants with a criminal history in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable laws regarding criminal background inquiries, including, to the extent applicable, Article 23-A of the New York Correction Law; San Francisco, California Police Code Article 49, Sections 4901-4920; New York City's Fair Chance Act; Philadelphia's Fair Criminal Records Screening Act; and other applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations regarding criminal background inquiries.
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