Director Test Engineering Lead Wholesale Credit Risk Technology

Citi • Jersey City, NJ

9d • $170,000 - $300,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Citi's Wholesale Credit Risk (WCR) Technology organization is seeking a Test Engineering Lead (Director, C15) to own and drive the quality engineering strategy for the Helios platform — Citi's strategic credit risk management ecosystem spanning Credit Review, Credit Approvals, Collateral, Covenants, Helios Lynx, and related applications. This is a hands-on, technically credible leadership role for an individual who can operate simultaneously as a people leader of a global testing organization and as a technical change agent who personally understands (and can demonstrate) modern test automation and emerging GenAI-driven testing approaches. The successful candidate will be the architect of Helios's transformation from a largely manual, high-touch regression model toward a highly automated, AI-augmented, continuously-testing operating model — directly improving speed-to-production, defect containment, and cost efficiency for one of Citi's most business-critical credit platforms. This role will partner closely with Development, SRE, Product, and Business Analysis leads across the Helios program.

Requirements

• 15+ years of relevant experience
• 12+ years of progressive experience in software testing, test automation, and software development, including significant hands-on technical experience (not purely managerial).
• 10+ years experience and proven track record leading global, multi-region testing/QE teams (onshore/offshore models), including managing both direct employees and vendor/contractor resources.
• 10+ years experience and demonstrated success driving large-scale test automation transformations — measurably increasing automation coverage, reducing regression cycle times, and reducing manual testing effort/backlog.
• Hands-on experience (current or recent) with modern test automation frameworks and approaches, such as: BDD frameworks: Cucumber/Gherkin, UI/API automation: Playwright (TypeScript), Selenium
• Test management platforms: Zephyr, Octane, or equivalent enterprise test management tooling
• CI/CD and test execution infrastructure at scale (e.g., FAST or equivalent internal test-runner/dashboarding platforms)
• Direct experience piloting or scaling GenAI/AI-based tooling in a software development or testing context — e.g., AI-assisted test generation, AI code/test review copilots, agentic coding/testing platforms, or AI-powered defect triage — with the ability to speak credibly and technically to these solutions.
• Experience in financial services, capital markets, or credit risk technology strongly preferred; direct familiarity with Wholesale Credit Risk, credit approvals, collateral, or covenant management platforms is a plus.
• Experience managing defect/problem management processes, including root-cause analysis, defect taxonomy, and linking production incidents/problems (e.g., ServiceNow PRBs/INCs) back into test coverage.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline required. BS or MS in Computer Science strongly preferred
• Technical depth: Must be able to engage credibly with engineers on architecture, code, automation frameworks, and AI tooling — this is not a purely managerial/administrative QE leadership role.
• Change leadership: A proven "agent of change" who can challenge legacy manual-first testing culture, build the case for investment, and execute transformation against resistance, budget constraints, and competing priorities.
• Data-driven management: Comfortable owning and presenting quality metrics/KPIs (automation %, defect ratios, pass rates, cycle times) to senior technology and business stakeholders.
• Global team leadership: Experience managing distributed, multicultural teams across time zones (NAM/EMEA/APAC), with strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Program/workstream management: Ability to structure, prioritize, and drive multiple concurrent workstreams (e.g., automation uplift, environment stability, tooling migration, headcount/budget planning, AI adoption) to defined outcomes and deadlines.
• Executive communication: Ability to present clearly and persuasively to Senior Technology Management and risk/control stakeholders, translating technical testing detail into business risk and value language.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience in a regulated banking/financial institution technology environment, with familiarity with change management, controls, and audit expectations for testing evidence.
• Familiarity with cloud-native test environments (e.g., Red Hat OpenShift/ECS) and infrastructure-aware test planning (SIT/UAT environment capacity, compute allocation).
• Experience standing up or maturing a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) or equivalent quality governance function.
• Certifications in test automation, Agile/Scrum leadership, or AI/ML fundamentals.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a global, cross-regional team of software testing professionals (SDETs, automation engineers, manual/functional testers, and test leads) spanning NAM, EMEA, and APAC.
• Define career paths, performance goals, and skills-uplift programs to shift the organization's skill mix from manual testing toward automation engineering and AI-augmented testing.
• Own headcount planning, budget management, and the transition from third-party managed testing services to a ring-fenced, sustainable internal/blended automation engineering team.
• Act as the senior QE voice in governance forums, steering committees, and Senior Technology Management reviews.
• Own the end-to-end test automation roadmap for Helios, spanning API (Cucumber/Gherkin BDD), UI (Playwright/TypeScript, Selenium), and integration/E2E test suites, executed on Citi's FAST test infrastructure.
• Drive automation coverage from current levels toward the 90%+ target, systematically eliminating "manual only" and "manual pending" backlog categories.
• Establish and enforce test data management, environment stability, and production-representative test data strategies (including redacted production data refresh cycles) to eliminate flaky, low-confidence test results.
• Oversee migration and modernization of test management tooling (e.g., Zephyr to Octane) and reporting/dashboarding (FAST feature tag reporting, requirements coverage, regression dashboards).
• Serve as the primary driver and evangelist for GenAI adoption within the testing lifecycle — including AI-assisted test case generation, AI-augmented code/test review (e.g., GitHub Copilot), agentic development platforms (e.g., Devin), and AI-powered QA workspaces (e.g., Stylus, Friday.ai).
• Define governance and quality guardrails for AI-generated test artifacts, ensuring all AI-authored tests are validated before being promoted into regression suites.
• Identify, pilot, and scale new GenAI-based testing solutions that measurably improve timeliness (faster regression cycles), quality (defect containment, reduced escapes to production), and cost (reduced manual effort and headcount intensity) of delivering software to production.
• Partner with Engineering, Architecture, and Citi's broader GenAI tooling teams to pull emerging capabilities into the Helios testing pipeline ahead of the broader organization.
• Own quality KPIs and reporting cadence: automation coverage %, defect-to-story-point ratios, mean time to detect/resolve defects, regression pass rates, and production incident/problem trends tied back to test coverage gaps.
• Establish and maintain traceability between Agile requirements (Jira stories), automated test cases, and production Problem tickets (PRB-to-test-case mapping) to close testing blind spots systematically.
• Present testing health, risk, and roadmap progress to Senior Technology Management, Business, and Risk/Control stakeholders on a regular basis.
• Partner with SRE and Environment teams to ensure environment availability, stability, and capacity (including compute/ACU planning) support high-volume automated execution.
• Act as a trusted partner to Development leads, Product Owners, Business Analysts, and Site Reliability Engineering to embed quality earlier in the SDLC ("shift-left" testing).
• Collaborate with Testing Centers of Excellence (TCoE) and external advisory partners to benchmark practices and identify improvement opportunities.
• Represent the testing organization in the transition to a target operating model in which development teams increasingly own integration-level testing while QE focuses on E2E, governance, tooling, and automation engineering excellence.

Benefits

• medical, dental & vision coverage
• 401(k)
• life, accident, and disability insurance
• wellness programs
• paid time off packages, including planned time off (vacation), unplanned time off (sick leave), and paid holidays

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director