Senior Director, Data Engineer

The Senior Director, Data Engineer will lead engineering teams responsible for cloud-based data platforms for banking. This role focuses on multi-year strategy and architecture for identity analytics, access decisioning, and AI/ML security platform capabilities, with an emphasis on scalable, real-time data and machine learning systems.

Role Responsibilities

• Own enterprise strategy and a multi-year roadmap for identity analytics, access decisioning, and AI/ML security platforms, aligning AI/ML investment with business, audit, and regulatory priorities and partnering with C-suite and CISO-org stakeholders to fund next-generation capabilities.
• Lead and grow a 50+ person organization spanning Data Engineering, ML, Generative AI, and Security Products, including managers and senior individual contributors; hire, develop, and retain technical talent while setting engineering standards for consistent delivery.
• Set technical direction hands-on by reviewing architectures, model designs, and system trade-offs, staying close to the code and data to make sound decisions under uncertainty.
• Architect low-latency, event-driven systems for real-time identity decisioning and threat detection using streaming telemetry, behavioral signals, and contextual graph data.
• Design, build, and maintain robust ML infrastructure and pipelines supporting end-to-end workflows, including feature extraction, training, testing, guardrails, evaluation, deployment, and real-time and batch inference with high performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Advance MLOps practices through automated, metrics-backed deployment workflows, integration validation and testing systems, and scalable monitoring and observability for models in production.
• Build an intelligence layer for agentic and non-human identity by combining behavioral analytics, ML-based intent determination, and context graphs to secure AI agents and workload identities.
• Apply state-of-the-art LLM and GenAI techniques in production for threat-intelligence summarization, automated incident triage, and adaptive access-policy recommendation, including optimization to improve scalability, cost, latency, and throughput.
• Operate an automated governance function with pipelines from enterprise and IGA platforms, operationalizing NIST controls through continuous control validation and audit-ready evidence.
• Lead enterprise readiness for emerging cyber risk from frontier AI models and agentic attack patterns.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or a related quantitative field (Statistics, Economics, Operations Research, Analytics, Mathematics, Engineering).
• At least 9 years of experience in data engineering.
• At least 7 years of people management experience.
• At least 7 years of experience programming with Python, Java, or Scala.
• At least 5 years of experience driving technical delivery of roadmap features.
• At least 6 years of experience designing and developing data pipelines.
• At least 4 years of experience in data modeling and designing end-to-end data solutions using both relational and non-relational database systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 12+ years of experience in application development with demonstrated proficiency in Python, SQL, Scala, or Java.
• 8+ years of hands-on experience designing, deploying, and operating data workloads in at least one public cloud environment (AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud).
• 8+ years of experience building or supporting distributed data or compute workloads using EMR, Spark, Glue, or Databricks.
• 8+ years of experience designing, implementing, and operating real-time or streaming data pipelines.
• 6+ years of experience in data observability (e.g., Monte Carlo, Splunk) or data orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Dagster).
• 8+ years of experience working with unstructured or semistructured data using NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB).
• 8+ years of experience designing and supporting data warehousing solutions (e.g., Snowflake, Redshift).
• 6+ years of experience working in an Agile development environment.
• 6+ years of experience developing user-centric reusable data products.
• 5+ years of experience in Data Governance, Data Governance Platforms, Data Standardization, and Data Modeling.

Technologies

Python, Java, Scala, NIST, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, EMR, Spark, Glue, Databricks, Airflow, Dagster, Monte Carlo, Splunk, MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, Snowflake, Redshift, SQL

Compensation

Salary: USD 314,800 - 359,300 per year (McLean, VA). Full-time annual salary ranges by location are also provided for New York, NY; Plano, TX; and Richmond, VA.

Benefits

• Performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI).
• Comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support total well-being.

Additional Information

• Location: McLean, VA (onsite).
• Posted date: 9/25/2026.
• Capital One will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
• 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 consistent with applicable laws regarding criminal background inquiries.
• For accommodation requests related to applying, contact Capital One Recruiting at 1-800-304-9102 or via email at [email protected].
• For technical support or questions about Capital One’s recruiting process, email [email protected].
• Capital One does not provide, endorse, or guarantee third-party products, services, educational tools, or other information available through this site.
• Capital One Financial is made up of several different entities; positions may vary by country (Canada, United Kingdom, or Philippines).