Senior Java Engineering Lead (Payments Technology) — Vice President

Citi•Tampa, FL

12d•$113,840 - $170,760•Hybrid

About The Position

Citi's Core Payment Systems team is looking for a Senior Engineering Lead, Payments Technology to architect, build, and evolve the global payment processing platforms that sit at the heart of one of the world's largest financial institutions. In this Vice President-level role, you will combine deep hands-on engineering with technical leadership, setting the direction for a cross-functional team responsible for delivering highly resilient, high-throughput microservices that process transactions at global scale. This is an opportunity to shape the future of mission-critical payment infrastructure using modern engineering practices, AI-accelerated development, and cloud-native architecture.

Requirements

6+ years of software development experience delivering complex, enterprise-scale backend applications, with at least 3 years in a hands-on technical leadership capacity.
Expert-level proficiency in Java and the Spring Boot framework, with a demonstrable ability to build and operate production-grade microservices at scale.
Deep knowledge of microservice architecture, Domain-Driven Design, and event-driven patterns, combined with hands-on experience using messaging and event-streaming platforms such as Kafka or RabbitMQ.
Practical experience with containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud platforms, alongside solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing strategies, and modern DevOps practices.
Proven ability to apply Clean Code and SOLID design principles in practice — through code reviews, team coaching, and direct contribution to production codebases.
Hands-on expertise with both relational databases (such as Oracle) and NoSQL databases (such as MongoDB), with the ability to select the appropriate technology for each use case.
Excellent communication skills, with a track record of engaging effectively with both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders in a mission-critical environment.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience deploying and scaling AI-powered developer tools — such as GitHub Copilot or Amazon CodeWhisperer — within an enterprise engineering team, including application of AI-assisted code review, test generation, and AIOps platforms such as Dynatrace AI or Splunk ITSI to reduce MTTR and improve system reliability.
Demonstrated ability to embed AI and ML capabilities — including anomaly detection, predictive alerting, and fraud signal enrichment — directly into production payment or financial services systems, with an understanding of responsible AI governance and regulatory compliance obligations.
Proven experience architecting distributed payment or financial transaction systems to 99.99%+ availability, including hands-on implementation of active-active multi-region failover, blue-green or canary deployments, Circuit Breakers using Resilience4j or Hystrix, and Saga orchestration for distributed transactions.
Experience leading Site Reliability Engineering practices, including ownership of SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs, execution of Chaos Engineering experiments using tools such as Chaos Monkey or Gremlin, and building end-to-end observability stacks with distributed tracing and real-time alerting.
Familiarity with financial services payment standards and protocols such as SWIFT, ISO 20022, or clearing systems, gained through prior experience in a regulated financial services environment.

Responsibilities

Lead the end-to-end delivery of critical payment applications as a Senior Engineering Lead, owning the full software development lifecycle from architectural design through to production deployment and ongoing support.
Design and build high-throughput, low-latency microservices using Java 8+, Spring Boot, and cloud-native principles, ensuring each service meets rigorous standards for performance, scalability, and security.
Champion modern architectural patterns — including Domain-Driven Design, event-driven architecture, and containerization with Docker and Kubernetes — to accelerate the transformation of legacy payment platforms.
Mentor and guide a cross-functional engineering team, establishing clear technical standards through code reviews that enforce Clean Code and SOLID design principles across all payment services.
Integrate AI-powered developer tooling — such as GitHub Copilot and LLM-based code generation — into the software development lifecycle to increase delivery velocity and enable intelligent automated test generation and static analysis.
Architect payment systems to achieve 99.99%+ availability by implementing active-active failover, multi-region redundancy, zero-downtime deployments, and resilience patterns including Circuit Breakers, Bulkheads, and Saga-based transaction management.
Define and own SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs for all critical payment services, lead Chaos Engineering experiments to proactively surface weaknesses, and partner with infrastructure teams to leverage Kubernetes auto-scaling and service mesh technologies for traffic management.
Collaborate with product managers, business analysts, and operations partners to translate complex payment domain requirements into scalable, maintainable technical solutions backed by comprehensive documentation.