Senior Engineering Lead – Payments Platform (SVP)

About Citi:

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments, and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.

As a bank with a brain and a soul, Citi creates economic value that is systemically responsible and in our clients' best interests. As a financial institution that touches every region of the world and every sector that shapes your daily life, our Enterprise Operations & Technology teams are charged with a mission that rivals any large tech company. Our technology solutions are the foundations of everything we do from keeping the bank safe, managing global resources, and providing the technical tools our workers need to be successful to designing our digital architecture and ensuring our platforms provide a first-class customer experience. We reimagine client and partner experiences to deliver excellence through secure, reliable, and efficient services.

Our commitment to diversity includes a workforce that represents the clients we serve from all walks of life, backgrounds, and origins. We foster an environment where the best people want to work. We value and demand respect for others, promote individuals based on merit, and ensure opportunities for personal development are widely available to all. Ideal candidates are innovators with well-rounded backgrounds who bring their authentic selves to work and complement our culture of delivering results with pride. If you are a problem solver who seeks passion in your work, come join us. We'll enable growth and progress together.

About the Team:

The Senior Engineering Lead – Payments Platform is a senior-level innovator and technical architect trusted to define the future of Citi's payments infrastructure at one of the world's most consequential financial institutions.

This is not a role for those content with maintaining the status quo. The ideal candidate brings a rare combination of deep technical mastery and systems-level thinking — someone who can simultaneously architect resilient, AI-powered microservices that power mission-critical payment transaction processing at scale, and translate that work into meaningful outcomes for Citi's clients and partners across the globe. As a senior leader on the Payments Platform team, this professional will be at the forefront of Citi's payments technology evolution, shaping platforms that are not only performant and secure, but self-healing, intelligent, and built to endure the demands of high-volume, real-time transaction processing.

In this role, the successful candidate will operate at the intersection of engineering excellence and organizational leadership — collaborating with cross-functional teams, payments product owners, end users, and senior stakeholders to deliver solutions that are as elegant as they are impactful. They will drive the adoption of cutting-edge methodologies, mentor the next generation of engineers, and ensure every technical decision reflects Citi's unwavering commitment to resilience, compliance, and client trust in the movement of funds. This is an opportunity to build something that matters — at a scale few institutions can offer.

Responsibilities:

• Lead integration of functions to meet goals, deploy new payments products/capabilities, and enhance payment processing workflows
• Analyze complex business processes, system processes, and payments industry standards (e.g., ISO 20022, card network rules, real-time payment scheme requirements) to define and develop solutions to high-level problems
• Provide expertise in area of advanced knowledge of applications programming and plan assignments involving large budgets, cross-functional projects, or multiple projects within the payments platform domain
• Develop application methodologies and standards for program analysis, design, coding, testing, debugging, and implementation
• Utilize advanced knowledge of supported main system flows and comprehensive knowledge of multiple areas to achieve technology goals across the payments platform
• Consult with payments product owners and business stakeholders to identify system function specifications and incorporate into overall system design
• Allocate work, and act as an advisor/coach to developers, analysts, and new team members
• Influence and negotiate with senior leaders and communicate with external parties
• Appropriately assess risk when business decisions are made, demonstrating particular consideration for the firm's reputation and safeguarding Citigroup, its clients and assets, by driving compliance with applicable laws, rules and regulations, adhering to Policy, applying sound ethical judgment regarding personal behavior, conduct and business practices, and escalating, managing and reporting control issues with transparency
• Resilient Microservices Architecture: Design and build fault-tolerant, loosely coupled microservices using patterns like circuit breakers, bulkheads, and active-active replication to ensure 99.99% continuous availability for mission-critical payment transaction processing
• AI-Driven Self-Healing: Integrate AI/ML models for predictive scaling, real-time anomaly detection, and automated self-healing to proactively mitigate system failures before they impact payment transactions and settlement
• Event-Driven AI Pipelines: Develop high-throughput, event-driven architectures (e.g., using Apache Kafka) that seamlessly ingest and process payment/transaction data for real-time AI capabilities without compromising core service availability
• Payments Regulatory & Operational Risk: Ensure platform design and engineering practices support compliance with applicable payments regulations and standards, such as PCI-DSS, AML/KYC transaction monitoring, and relevant payment scheme rules

Qualifications:

• 10+ years of hands-on Software Engineering experience, with a strong track record of individual technical contribution in enterprise-grade payments or financial transaction processing systems
• Demonstrated Subject Matter Expert (SME) in applications development using Java technologies, including Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and reactive programming frameworks, applied within payment processing, settlement, or funds transfer platforms
• Proficiency in programming languages including Java, Python, with deep experience designing, building, and maintaining enterprise-scale payments platforms across complex distributed systems
• Experience designing and implementing resilient microservices architectures using patterns such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, and active-active replication to achieve continuous, high-availability performance for mission-critical payments workloads
• Experience with event-driven and message-based architectures using Apache Kafka or equivalent platforms, including design and operation of high-throughput, real-time payment transaction and settlement data pipelines
• Working knowledge of payment rails, messaging standards, and protocols (e.g., ISO 20022, SWIFT, ACH, RTP, wire transfer systems) and their integration into distributed application architectures
• Understanding of payments processing lifecycle (authorization, clearing, settlement, reconciliation) and associated risk, fraud, and compliance considerations
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD tools including Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, with experience automating build, test, and deployment workflows in regulated payments or banking environments
• Proficiency with relational and NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle, or Redis, including performance tuning, query optimization, and schema design for high-volume transactional data
• Demonstrated experience leveraging Artificial Intelligence tools and technologies — including GitHub Copilot, Claude, or Devin — to accelerate development, improve code quality, and enhance engineering productivity
• Experience implementing monitoring and observability solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, or Splunk to ensure system reliability, performance visibility, and rapid incident response for payments platforms with strict SLA requirements
• Strong systems analysis skills, with the ability to translate complex payments business requirements and regulatory constraints into scalable software solutions
• Familiarity with payments industry regulations and standards (e.g., PCI-DSS, AML/KYC transaction monitoring, regional payment scheme rules) is a plus
• Relationship and consensus-building skills, with experience influencing technical outcomes across payments product, risk, compliance, and operations stakeholders

Education:

Bachelor's degree/University degree or equivalent experience

Master's degree preferred

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In addition to salary, Citi’s offerings may also include, for eligible employees, discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards. Citi offers competitive employee benefits, including: medical, dental & vision coverage; 401(k); life, accident, and disability insurance; and wellness programs. Citi also offers paid time off packages, including planned time off (vacation), unplanned time off (sick leave), and paid holidays. For additional information regarding Citi employee benefits, please visit citibenefits.com. Available offerings may vary by jurisdiction, job level, and date of hire.

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We use automated processing, including artificial intelligence, for our legitimate business interests (or our reasonable and appropriate business purposes) to identify and align the candidate's skills and abilities with a specific job opening. Additionally, if you so choose, or consent, we can match your skills and abilities to other suitable roles at Citi.

Importantly, all our hiring processes and decisions, including determining your suitability for a role, are conducted, checked, and decided by individuals. Our automated processing and AI do not involve relying on automatic or autonomous decision-making. Please refer to any Jurisdictional Considerations, with specific provisions for your country (where relevant) for further details.

Illinois residents – AI Notice and Right

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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.

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