Principal Engineer Senior Vice President

Citi is looking for a Principal Engineer to join its Payments Technology team, where you will drive the technical vision and hands-on engineering behind one of the most strategically important payment platforms in global financial services. This is an end-to-end technical leadership role — spanning core APIs, microservices architecture, integrations, and the infrastructure that underpins a comprehensive suite of payment capabilities for Citi's clients worldwide. If you combine deep engineering craft with the instinct to solve complex design problems and the conviction to raise standards across a team, this is the role for you. Responsibilities * Architect and deliver end-to-end technical solutions across the payments platform, from core client-facing APIs through to integrations and supporting infrastructure. * Set and enforce engineering standards across the team — championing clean code, SOLID principles, and disciplined design practices that reduce technical debt and improve long-term maintainability. * Lead design reviews, proof-of-concept initiatives, and technical experiments that evaluate new approaches and establish the best path forward for platform evolution. * Translate complex system requirements into clear, well-structured software design artifacts that guide consistent, high-quality implementation across engineering teams. * Guide and mentor engineers at all levels on what good code and good design look like in practice, through hands-on collaboration, pairing, and direct technical coaching. * Coordinate technical delivery across internal and cross-functional teams, owning estimation, solution planning, and implementation leadership for concurrent initiatives. * Embed resilience and high-availability thinking into every layer of the architecture, ensuring platform reliability at the scale Citi's clients demand. * Manage technical risk with transparency and pragmatism, identifying issues early and communicating clearly to protect delivery timelines and platform integrity. Required Qualifications & Skills * 10 or more years of hands-on design and development experience, with deep Java expertise and a demonstrable commitment to clean code and SOLID engineering principles. * Practical experience building medium to large-scale applications using Spring Boot, Microservices, and Kafka on open-source technology stacks. * Hands-on experience with MongoDB and a strong grasp of data modelling and persistence patterns within distributed systems. * Proven ability to design and build resilient, high-availability architectures that perform reliably under real-world, high-throughput conditions. * Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and single-click deployment workflows, with familiarity across tooling such as Tekton, Harness, Lightspeed, or OpenShift. * Fluency in test-driven and behaviour-driven development practices, including writing unit and integration tests using JUnit and standard testing frameworks. * An active practitioner of AI tools and generative AI technologies, applying them to drive engineering productivity and delivery efficiency. * Clear, confident communicator who can articulate technical decisions and surface delivery risks effectively to both engineering and non-technical audiences. Beneficial Skills & Qualifications * Experience authoring functional and technical specification documentation to a standard that enables independent implementation by distributed engineering teams. * Familiarity with site reliability engineering principles and a genuine interest in how reliability engineering shapes product development outcomes. * A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience. * A master's degree or equivalent postgraduate qualification in a relevant technical field. What We Offer At Citi, you will work on technically demanding, high-stakes payment systems that operate at genuine global scale...