Head of Product and Engineering - Director

Director (C15) - Head of Product and Engineering

Location: Pune (Hybrid)

Line of Business: Compliance Technology / Enterprise Technology

About the Role

Are you a product engineering leader who excels at driving massive platform consolidations, leading high-performing global teams, and solving complex distributed systems challenges? Do you believe in solving complex problem through technology simplification and modernisation?

At Citi, we are executing a bold, multi-year technology modernisation strategy. A critical pillar of this transformation is the unification of our global compliance enterprise workflow and case management systems. As the Head of Product and Engineering, you will be the strategic engineering leader and product visionary responsible for driving the consolidation, modernisation, and scaling of our global compliance case management platforms.

In this dual-hatted role, you will:

Lead Global Case Management & Workflow Platforms: Direct a globally distributed engineering organisation tasked with building and scaling our unified, high-throughput enterprise workflow and decisioning platforms.

Serve as the India Site Lead: Act as the senior technology executive for our regional engineering hub in India, driving talent strategy, engineering culture, and operational excellence across the site.

This is a high-visibility, executive-level role reporting directly to the Managing Director, Global Head of Product and Engineering.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technical Strategy ,Platform Unification and Product Management

• Drive Platform Consolidation: Define and execute the technical strategy to consolidate disparate legacy workflow and case management systems into a single, modern, global platform.
• Architectural Modernization: Lead the transition of core platforms to a cloud-native, microservices-based, and event-driven architecture capable of processing millions of complex events daily with sub-second latency.
• AI & Automation Integration: Partner with AI/ML research teams to embed intelligent routing, automated document processing, and machine learning-driven decision support systems into the core workflow engine.
• Technical Governance: Establish and enforce robust architectural standards, API designs, and data schemas that ensure long-term platform extensibility and maintainability.
• Product leadership: Thought leader and ability to wear the product hat. Ability to drive strategic product decision along with key stakeholders

2. Global Engineering Leadership & Execution

• Manage Globally Distributed Teams: Lead, inspire, and scale a multi-disciplinary engineering organization(75+)
• Foster Engineering Excellence: Establish rigorous standards for code quality, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and comprehensive observability (monitoring, tracing, logging) to ensure 99.999% platform availability.
• Operational & Financial Management: Oversee financial planning, resource allocation, vendor management, and operational budgets for your global engineering organisation.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Product Management, Operations, Risk, and senior business executives to align engineering roadmaps with business outcomes.

3. India Site Leadership

• Site Strategy & Growth: Act as the senior executive and site lead for the regional engineering hub in India. Drive local talent acquisition, retention, and career development programs.
• Culture & Collaboration: Build a vibrant, inclusive, and high-performance engineering culture that mirrors the best practices of top-tier product technology companies.
• Local Governance: Ensure compliance with local regulations, operational standards, and corporate policies.

Our Target Tech Stack & Architecture

We are actively migrating our platforms to a modern, cloud-native stack:

• Backend & Microservices: Go, Java (Spring Boot), Python, gRPC, REST APIs
• Frontend & Workflows: React, Angular, TypeScript, Modern BPMN/Workflow Engines (e.g., Temporal, Camunda, Flowable)
• Data & Event Streaming: Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes, AWS, Service Mesh (Istio)
• AI/ML & Analytics: Multi-LLM integrations via secure internal gateways, Vector Databases, Python-based ML pipelines

What We’re Looking For (Qualifications)

Basic Qualifications:

• Experience: 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 5+ years in an engineering leadership role (Director, Senior Engineering Manager, or equivalent) at Product-Engineering first setup
•  Platform Unification: Proven track record of successfully leading large-scale platform consolidations, legacy migrations, or enterprise-wide system unifications.
• Distributed Systems: Deep expertise in designing and operating high-availability, low-latency, and highly secure distributed systems at massive scale.
• Global Leadership: Experience managing globally distributed engineering teams of 80+ engineers, including direct management of engineering managers and principal architects.
• Site Leadership: Proven experience leading a regional engineering site or hub, with a strong track record of building local talent pipelines and fostering a strong engineering culture.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Domain Knowledge: Experience in compliance, sanctions, transaction risk, anti-money laundering (AML), fraud detection, or high-scale transactional risk systems is highly desirable but not mandatory. We value core engineering leadership and platform-building capabilities above specific domain experience.
• Workflow & BPMN Expertise: Familiarity with modern workflow orchestration engines (e.g., Temporal, Camunda) and complex state-machine design.
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.

Why Join Citi?

• Unprecedented Scale & Impact: We secure and facilitate the global financial system. The platforms you unify will protect trillions of dollars in daily transactions from financial crime and regulatory risk.
• True Autonomy: You will have the mandate, budget, and executive backing to make critical architectural and organizational decisions to achieve our platform unification goals.
• Modern Developer Ecosystem: Leverage Citi's state-of-the-art internal developer platforms, including our secure GenAI gateway and modern serverless application frameworks, to accelerate delivery.

And many more reasons…

------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------

Citi is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified candidates will receive consideration without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.

If you are a person with a disability and need a reasonable accommodation to use our search tools and/or apply for a career opportunity review Accessibility at Citi.
View Citi’s EEO Policy Statement and the Know Your Rights poster.