Head of Personal Loans Core Platforms and Lending Integrations - Director

Citi • Jacksonville, FL

18h • $170,000 - $300,000 • Onsite

About The Position

The Head of USCC Personal Loans Core Platforms and Lending Integrations is accountable for the execution and delivery of next-generation API integration platforms across value proposition, lending, and commerce ecosystems. This role owns a critical engineering function responsible for building scalable, secure, and compliant integration platforms that support Value Cards, Lending and Commerce business in USCC. The individual applies deep technical expertise and strong business understanding to translate strategic priorities into enterprise-grade API integration solutions.
This is a highly technical leadership role, requiring the individual to actively drive architecture, influence low-level design, and guide implementation through principal and senior engineers. The role is expected to set engineering standards, define technical guardrails, and contribute hands-on where required, including the ability to review, prototype, and write production-grade code to unblock teams or validate approaches.
Operating within a highly regulated environment, this role is responsible for end-to-end platform delivery, operational stability, and risk alignment, while managing multiple teams and influencing outcomes across a matrixed organization. The position requires balancing innovation in API-driven integrations with strong governance, control frameworks, and production reliability.
The role has direct accountability for engineering delivery, people leadership and financial management while influencing cross-functional stakeholders across product, risk and external partners. It plays a key role in advancing Citi's value cards, Lending and Commerce capabilities through modern engineering practices, platform reuse, and scalable ecosystem integration. Typically, a direct report to a C16/MD role and functions as an integral member of the functional leadership team within a country/site location, job family, or line of business.

Requirements

• 15+ years of relevant experience in a senior Engineering or Technology leadership role
• Significant experience building complex business and/or transactional models, particularly in API integration, lending systems, or commerce platforms. Has thrived and succeeded in delivering high quality technology products/services in a high growth environment where priorities shift rapidly.
• Proven track record of designing and implementing enterprise-grade API architectures, including RESTful APIs, GraphQL, event-driven architectures, and microservices patterns
• Deep expertise in integration patterns, including synchronous and asynchronous communication, message queuing, API gateways, and service mesh technologies
• First-class leadership and influencing skills, including experience managing a Software Engineering Team. Demonstrated interpersonal and talent management skills, including the ability to identify and develop engineering talent.
• Ability to use hard data and metrics to back up assumptions and develop business cases
• Excellent communication skills required in order to negotiate internally, often at a senior level. Some external communication/negotiation may be necessary.
• Experience with modern technology stacks including cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code
• Strong understanding of security best practices for API development, including OAuth, JWT, API key management, encryption, and threat modeling
• Knowledge of financial services domain, particularly in lending, payments, and commerce platforms
• Experience with API management platforms and integration middleware solutions
• Bachelor's/University degree required, Master's degree preferred in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field

Responsibilities

• Own delivery and ongoing evolution of Personal Loans Core and Lending API integration for Lending domain, ensuring systems are scalable, resilient, and aligned with business priorities. Drive execution across multiple teams and manage interdependencies to deliver consistent, high-quality outcomes.
• Provide direction on target-state architecture and engineering standards, including API-first and event-driven design, microservices architecture, and secure integration patterns. Actively engage in design reviews, challenge assumptions, and guide principal engineers in solving complex technical problems.
• Lead the design, implementation, and successful delivery of large-scale or significantly difficult software solutions that have a long-term impact on products, technology, or architecture across value, lending, and commerce platforms.
• Design approaches and personally contribute code that is noteworthy in some way (e.g., a significant refactor that simplifies or improves architectural quality, enables competitive advantage, offers significant extensibility, performance, scalability, or has organization-wide operational excellence impact). Identify and tackle intrinsically hard problems (e.g., highly complex, ambiguous, undefined, with less existing structure, or having significant business or security risk or potential for significant impact).
• Deliver artifacts that set the standard within your organization for engineering excellence, from designs to algorithms to implementations. Your personal code submissions and reviews of other people's code are instructive and make the overall code corpus better.
• Lead and actively participate in design reviews, aligning teams across your organization towards coherent architectural strategies. You bring clarity to complexity, probe assumptions, illuminate pitfalls, and foster shared understanding.
• Oversee development of API integration workflows for value proposition services, lending capabilities, and commerce platforms, including authentication, authorization, transaction orchestration, and third-party integrations. Ensure solutions are built with appropriate controls, auditability, and alignment to regulatory and risk requirements.
• Lead engineering efforts supporting seamless integration with internal and external systems, including partner APIs, data platforms, and core banking systems. Drive development of real-time integration capabilities and data-driven solutions to enhance customer and business outcomes.
• Keep abreast of industry trends. You effectively research and benchmark our technology against other competing software in the industry. You understand that many problems are not essentially new.
• Ensure adherence to Citi's risk and control framework, including data privacy, regulatory compliance, and secure development practices. Maintain accountability for platform integrity, traceability, and operational readiness.
• 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, as well as effectively supervise the activity of others and create accountability with those who fail to maintain these standards.
• Lead and develop engineering teams with responsibility for hiring, performance, and career development, while managing budget and resource allocation. Influence stakeholders across technology and business to align delivery with strategic objectives.
• Actively recruit as well as participate in the hiring/interview process. Play a significant role in the career development of others, actively mentoring and educating the larger SDE community on trends, technologies, and best practices.
• You are a pragmatic problem solver, applying judgment and experience to balance trade-offs between competing interests. You are flexible, adapting your approach to meet the needs of the team, project, and product.
• Contribute to intellectual property (e.g., invent, submit patents, etc.) that advances Citi's competitive position in API integration and digital platform capabilities.
• Full management responsibility for multiple teams, including management of people, budget and planning, to include duties such as performance evaluation, compensation, hiring, disciplinary actions and terminations and budget approval.

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