Senior Java Platform Engineer — Senior Vice President

Citi • Tampa, FL

13h • $141,440 - $212,160 • Hybrid

About The Position

Citi is looking for a Senior Java Platform Engineer to lead the engineering of a global check payment platform at the heart of the Payments Platform and Cheque Processing Transformation Initiative. This is a senior role that blends deep, hands-on Java engineering with platform strategy ownership you will write and review production code, shape the architecture of distributed payment systems, and guide a scrum team to deliver mission-critical capabilities across the full payment lifecycle. Your work will directly influence the reliability, scalability, and modernisation of a platform that processes high-volume financial transactions globally.

Requirements

• 10 or more years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a people management or senior engineering leadership capacity.
• Extensive hands-on Java engineering experience in high-throughput, production environments, including JVM performance tuning, GC optimisation, thread management, and memory profiling.
• Hands-on design of microservices architectures using Spring Boot or Spring MVC, covering service decomposition, RESTful API design, inter-service communication, and cloud-native deployment.
• Deep practical expertise in Kafka, including topic design, partitioning strategies, consumer group management, and high-throughput stream processing with exactly-once semantics.
• Hands-on database engineering across Oracle and Microsoft SQL (schema design, query optimisation, indexing) and MongoDB (document modelling, aggregation pipelines, sharding, replica sets).
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native infrastructure including OpenShift, AWS, Kubernetes, and Docker, covering container orchestration, autoscaling, and CI/CD pipeline design using tools such as Jenkins, Gradle, and Maven.
• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with agentic AI frameworks such as LangChain or AutoGen, RAG patterns, or vector databases such as Pinecone or Weaviate, applied in an enterprise or regulated context.
• Hands-on Python experience in data pipelines, AI/ML integration, scripting, or automation within a financial services or high-throughput engineering environment.
• Experience leading large-scale legacy modernisation programmes, including migration of mainframe components written in COBOL, Assembler, or C++ into cloud-native microservices.
• Knowledge of MLOps practices including model versioning, deployment pipelines, and production model monitoring, alongside real-time ML model serving techniques.
• Experience with chaos engineering, resilience testing, or fault injection, and familiarity with reconciliation and exception handling patterns in settlement workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production-grade Java microservices for a high-volume, low-latency global check payment platform, including hands-on coding, architecture reviews, and code reviews that set the technical standard for the team.
• Architect event-driven, fault-tolerant distributed systems using Kafka, Spring Boot, and RESTful APIs, covering message schema design, topic partitioning, consumer group strategies, and exactly-once processing.
• Define and govern data architecture across Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and MongoDB, driving schema design, indexing strategies, query optimisation, and data consistency across transactional and settlement workflows.
• Own the engineering roadmap for modernising the check payment platform, migrating mainframe and monolithic legacy components into reusable, cloud-native microservices aligned to Citi Engineering Excellence Standards.
• Lead platform performance engineering by profiling JVM-based applications, identifying and resolving bottlenecks, and optimising critical settlement processing paths to meet SLA commitments on availability, throughput, and latency.
• Embed AI-powered engineering practices across the team by leveraging tools such as GitHub Copilot and LLMs (including Gemini) to improve code quality, automate test generation, and accelerate vulnerability identification and remediation.
• Act as the primary engineering point of contact for the Check Processing pillar, communicating platform health, delivery progress, and engineering strategy clearly to senior business, technology, and operations stakeholders.
• Own the platform's security and compliance posture by leading threat modelling, vulnerability assessments, and secure design reviews to ensure the platform meets regulatory and risk requirements.

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: Senior