Lead Java Developer - Senior Vice President

Citi is hiring a Senior Java Engineer to lead the technical transformation of its global cheque payment platform — a critical infrastructure at the heart of high-volume financial transaction processing. In this senior engineering role within the Payments Platform organisation, you will combine deep hands-on coding in Java with platform strategy ownership, guiding a scrum team through the modernisation of core payment systems from legacy mainframe architectures to cloud-native microservices. This is a rare opportunity to architect and deliver at scale while embedding AI-driven practices into both the platform and the engineering workflow.

Design and build production-grade Java microservices for a high-volume, low-latency cheque payment platform, authoring reusable frameworks, conducting architecture reviews, and setting the technical standard for the team. Architect event-driven, fault-tolerant distributed systems using Apache Kafka — covering message schema design, topic partitioning, consumer group strategies, and exactly-once processing semantics. Define and execute the engineering roadmap for modernising the cheque payment platform, migrating global components from monolithic mainframe applications to scalable, cloud-native microservices. Own the platform's data architecture across Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and MongoDB — governing schema design, query optimisation, indexing strategies, and data consistency patterns across relational and NoSQL stores. Drive AI-powered engineering quality across the team — integrating tools such as GitHub Copilot and LLMs (including Gemini) for automated test generation, vulnerability scanning, and enhanced payment processing accuracy. Lead performance engineering for JVM-based applications — profiling hotspots, tuning garbage collection, optimising thread management, and improving critical settlement processing paths. Own the security and compliance posture of the platform through threat modelling, vulnerability assessments, and secure design reviews, ensuring alignment to engineering excellence standards across CI/CD, DevOps, and cloud-native delivery. Act as the primary engineering point of contact for the cheque processing pillar, communicating platform health, delivery progress, and engineering strategy to senior business and technology stakeholders. Required qualifications & skills Extensive hands-on Java engineering experience in high-throughput, production-grade environments, including JVM performance tuning, GC optimisation, and thread and memory profiling. Proven ability to design and deliver microservices-based architectures using Spring Boot or Spring MVC, with hands-on expertise in RESTful API design, service decomposition, and inter-service communication patterns. Deep practical knowledge of Apache Kafka, including topic design, partitioning strategies, consumer groups, exactly-once semantics, and high-throughput stream processing. Hands-on expertise with Oracle SQL and MongoDB, covering schema design, query optimisation, indexing, aggregation pipelines, sharding, and replica set configuration. Cloud-native engineering experience with OpenShift, AWS, Kubernetes, and Docker — including container orchestration, autoscaling, and cloud-native deployment practices. Hands-on ownership of CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, Gradle, and Maven, with experience in DevOps practices, observability tooling such as Grafana, and distributed tracing. Demonstrated experience delivering at scale within Agile or SAFe frameworks, including PI planning, cross-team dependency management, and programme-level governance. Beneficial skills & qualifications Familiarity with real-time ML model serving, MLOps practices, RAG patterns, or agentic AI frameworks such as LangChain or AutoGen in an enterprise or regulated environment. Experience leading large-scale legacy modernisation programmes — migrating mainframe components written in COBOL, Assembler, or C++