Director - Technical Engineering Lead (Full stack)

Citi's Payments Technology team is hiring a Senior Engineering Lead to architect and lead a critical payment platform that sits at the intersection of engineering ambition and real-world financial impact. As a Senior Engineering Lead, you will direct multiple engineering teams responsible for designing, building, and operating an active-active, resilient platform architecture that processes payment traffic with very low latency. This is a rare opportunity for a hands-on engineering leader to own a multi-year technical roadmap, build and scale a world-class global engineering organization, and deliver AI-accelerated, cloud-native systems that operate with the highest standards of availability across multiple geographies and regulatory environments. If you are energized by hard engineering problems and want your work to matter at a global level, this role is built for you.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and multi-year roadmap for the payment platform, making architectural decisions that shape how a high-throughput, multi-consumer ecosystem evolves.
• Direct the design and build of an active-active, resilient platform architecture using low-latency technologies to maintain continuous availability across multiple geographic regions.
• Evaluate and select the right technology for each engineering problem, balancing performance, maintainability, and long-term platform resilience.
• Champion AI-accelerated development practices across engineering teams, embedding intelligent automation and modern tooling to raise delivery velocity and quality.
• Embed automation testing as a standard practice, enabling teams to deploy the platform to production every day with confidence.
• Partner with risk, compliance, and infrastructure teams to embed security controls and disaster recovery planning across operating regions.
• Present team and project status updates to senior management and business leaders, translating technical progress into business outcomes.
• Coordinate with a broad stakeholder ecosystem across technology, business, and operations to align the platform's roadmap with enterprise priorities.
• Assess risk in engineering and operational decisions, ensuring compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and Citi policy while escalating control issues with transparency.

Required Qualifications & Skills

• 15+ years of software engineering and technology leadership experience, with at least 10 years in hands-on leadership of enterprise-grade, high-traffic applications.
• Demonstrated expertise designing and operating highly available, multi-region distributed systems, including active-active topologies, data residency controls, and disaster recovery strategies.
• Deep hands-on proficiency in Java, Spring Boot, with practical experience building microservices,, gRPC , and event-driven systems using Apache Kafka or equivalent high-throughput messaging platforms.
• Fluency across the full engineering stack — back-end (Java, Spring), data stores (Oracle, MongoDB), and containerized cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift, public cloud).
• Minimum 8 years leading globally distributed engineering teams, with the ability to set technical direction, drive delivery accountability, and develop engineering talent across multiple geographies and regulatory contexts.
• Expertise in CI/CD, test-driven development, and automation testing practices applied consistently to maintain engineering quality and enable everyday production deployments.
• Fluency with AI-accelerated development tools and practices as a core part of day-to-day engineering delivery.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with experience navigating complex, matrixed organizations and driving alignment across business, technology, and operations.
• Proven ability to attract, develop, and retain top engineering talent in a competitive market.
• Experience operating in Agile or SAFe delivery frameworks at enterprise scale, with a bias for continuous delivery.

Beneficial Skills & Qualifications

• Experience within payments technology or broader financial services, with familiarity across payment types such as real-time payments, high-value transactions, or cross-border flows.
• Working knowledge of data residency, data sovereignty, and cross-border regulatory frameworks applied within large-scale distributed platform architecture.
• Practical use of AI-assisted development tooling to measurably improve engineering team productivity and code quality.

Education:

Bachelor’s degree/University degree or equivalent experience

Master’s degree preferred

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