Lead Java Platform Engineer (Payments Processing) - Senior Vice President

Job summary

Citi is seeking an experienced, hands-on Senior Java Developer to contribute to the development of engineering frameworks, with a strong focus on microservice architecture. This role combines technical contribution with organizational accountability, including owning platform strategy, defining engineering standards, and guiding a scrum team. The successful candidate will be responsible for the reliability, scalability, security, and evolution of a global cheque payment platform, and will play a pivotal role in integrating AI into both the platform and the engineering workflow.

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on experience in high-throughput, production-grade Java engineering, including JVM performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience building RESTful APIs with frameworks such as Spring MVC or Spring Boot.
• Proven experience designing microservices ecosystems, including service decomposition, API design, inter-service communication, and cloud engineering.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in Kafka, including topic design, partitioning, consumer groups, exactly-once semantics, and high-throughput stream processing.
• Hands-on experience with profiling and optimization, including JVM tuning, garbage collection (GC) optimization, thread management, and memory profiling.
• Practical experience designing resilience patterns such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, failover, and disaster recovery.
• Hands-on expertise in Oracle (SQL) and Microsoft SQL for schema design, query optimization, and indexing.
• Hands-on expertise in MongoDB (NoSQL) for document modeling, aggregation pipelines, sharding, and replica sets.
• Hands-on experience with OpenShift/AWS, Kubernetes, and Docker for container orchestration, autoscaling, and cloud-native deployment.
• Experience designing and owning CI/CD pipelines aligned with enterprise-level Engineering Excellence Standards.
• Experience with tools like Jenkins and Gradle/Maven.
• Hands-on experience with distributed tracing, intelligent alerting, and AI-driven observability using tools like Grafana.
• Practical experience with threat modeling, vulnerability assessments, and secure design reviews.
• Experience with Agile/SAFe delivery at the program level, including PI planning, cross-team dependency management, and delivery governance.
• Hands-on experience with real-time ML model serving, including feature stores, online inference, and model monitoring (Good-to-Have).
• Familiarity with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns, vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate), or agentic AI frameworks (e.g., LangChain, AutoGen) (Good-to-Have).
• Knowledge of MLOps practices such as model versioning, deployment pipelines, and production model monitoring (Good-to-Have).
• Experience with chaos engineering and resilience testing, including fault injection and production readiness reviews (Good-to-Have).
• Knowledge of reconciliation and exception handling patterns in settlement workflows (Good-to-Have).
• Familiarity with prompt engineering and LLM fine-tuning in a regulated enterprise context (Good-to-Have).

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the development of engineering frameworks with a strong focus on microservice architecture.
• Own platform strategy, define engineering standards, and guide a scrum team in developing core functionalities within the payments lifecycle.
• Ensure the reliability, scalability, security, and evolution of a global cheque payment platform.
• Integrate AI into the platform and engineering workflow.
• Actively code in Java, developing reusable frameworks, performing system design, architecture reviews, and code reviews.
• Contribute to the design of distributed, fault-tolerant, real-time systems for high-volume, low-latency transaction processing.
• Write, review, and refactor production-grade Java code, setting high technical standards.
• Independently design event-driven, microservices-based architectures using REST APIs, Java, and React.
• Apply hands-on experience with Kafka, including message schema design, topic partitioning, consumer group strategies, and fault-tolerant processing.
• Design and govern data architecture across Oracle (SQL) and MongoDB (NoSQL), covering schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, and data consistency patterns.
• Champion continuous development, feature flags, and progressive delivery, contributing to CI/CD pipeline design and optimization.
• Produce and review Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and technical design documents for key platform components.
• Maintain and enforce engineering standards within the scrum team, including Test-Driven Development (TDD), reusable framework development, CI/CD, secure coding, and observability.
• Conduct code reviews for critical platform components, providing detailed technical feedback to enhance quality and capacity.
• Drive the adoption of AI-powered quality practices, leveraging tools like GitHub Copilot and LLMs (Gemini preferred) for coding, payment processing quality, automated test script generation, and vulnerability remediation.
• Lead performance engineering initiatives, including profiling JVM-based applications to identify hotspots and optimize critical settlement processing paths.
• Own the security and compliance posture of the cheque payment platform by participating in threat modeling, vulnerability assessments, and secure design reviews.
• Ensure all engineering delivery aligns with Citi Engineering Excellence Standards, including CI/CD, DevOps, cloud-native practices, and modern ways of working.
• Define and own the engineering roadmap for modernizing the cheque payment platform, migrating global components from monolithic mainframe and legacy applications to a reusable microservices architecture.
• Develop strong domain knowledge in the payment lifecycle, settlement, and cheque image processing to inform engineering decisions.

Skills

Industry

Relocation