Hiring alert: Capital One is aiming to bring on 3,000 technologists by the end of 2021

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Amid cloud growth, banking giant Capital One plans to add 3,000 new roles for technologists by the end of 2021.

According to Capital One, almost 75% of the hires will be in engineering roles, focusing on machine learning, software development and data work to advance the company’s natural language processing.  Capital One said “hundreds” of positions will be open at the company’s headquarters in McLean, Virginia, with others will be at locations across the country.

Mindy Ferguson, managing vice president of technology in Capital One’s card division, told Technical.ly that the big hiring plans follow the company’s exit from all of its data centers. In place of the physical infrastructure, the company moved all of its applications and systems to a public cloud from Amazon Web Services. It’s an indicator of Capital One’s strong bet on advancing technology.

“That public cloud is really the driver of our technology journey and our aggressive hiring plan,” Ferguson said. “We now need people who can keep up with our hiring plan, and our hiring plan needs to keep up with the pace of technology, and the pace of technology doesn’t stop.”

Primarily, Capital One will be growing its machine learning and cloud infrastructure teams, along with adding any new capabilities or opportunities that come up within the cloud. It’ll also be looking to grow its data and real-time decisionmaking tools, similar to how Ferguson said the company has updated its fraud detection services using machine learning.

The new roles will follow Capital One’s permanent shift to a hybrid work model when it reopens offices in early September. At the end of June, the company announced that teams will be in-office on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and can work at home on Monday and Friday.

“We’re looking for people who are primarily located near where we have development locations today, because we do really find that collaboration in a workspace drives so much of the innovation. That collaboration, she said, “allows these ideas to come to the surface and to be built at a faster time to market.”

In the new tech roles, Capital One will be looking for “people who really know what great technology looks like,” Ferguson said, as well as candidates who are creative in problem-solving and change agents who can find spots for improvements. She added that since Capital One is so large that it can’t take the system down for a few hours for improvements, so the company looking for operators that can enable the company to have a 24/7 presence, especially as the company continues to grow.

“People need to come in and really understand that we are looking to hire at scale, and to do that means it’s all hands on deck for all of us to be active participants in how we grow the technologies,” Ferguson said. “I think that’s an incredible part of this journey.”

The hiring will come from a mix of external and internal candidates, Ferguson said, including graduates of its Capital One Developer Academy program, which helps students and employees who don’t have prior computer science training move into tech.

“Three thousand technology jobs is a lot to do in the next few months ahead of us, but I am absolutely convinced that Capital One can deliver on this mission,” Ferguson said. “We delivered on getting out of our data centers, and we absolutely will deliver on building a really great technology organization.”