Principal Java Engineer – Vice President

Citi is looking for a hands on Principal Engineer to design, build, and evolve high-quality software products that solve real business challenges at global scale. Principal Java Engineer you will leverage your deep technical knowledge to drive the creation of high-quality software products. You will also be expected to mentor other engineers, share your technical expertise, and promote a culture of technical excellence within the team. The Principal Engineer will report to an Engineering Manager and will be a floating member of multiple engineering teams. There is an expectation to contribute to the codebase and deliver solutions against the sprint-level commitments. From a technical standpoint, the Principal Engineer has full-stack coding and implementation responsibilities and adheres to best practice principles including modern cloud-based software development, agile and scrum, code quality, and tool usage. The Principal Engineer works to understand and influence software architecture, while contributing to Citi’s and GFT’s technical user base. ## Responsibilities * Design and build critical features and complex full-stack solutions using Java, delivering clean, efficient, and maintainable code that meets the highest quality standards across multiple agile teams. * Collaborate with fellow Principal Engineers to define, evolve, and influence overall system architecture, ensuring solutions are scalable, resilient, and aligned to business requirements. * Deliver against sprint-level commitments as an active contributor to agile delivery cycles, participating in planning, code reviews, and Scrum ceremonies across teams. * Provide expert technical guidance to engineering teams, helping them navigate complex challenges, make sound design decisions, and consistently ship high-quality software. * Evaluate emerging technologies, tools, and industry trends, providing actionable recommendations for adoption that improve engineering capability and product outcomes. * Partner continuously with stakeholders across the software development lifecycle to ensure technical solutions are aligned to business goals and delivered with measurable impact. * Promote a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement across teams, fostering knowledge sharing, engineering best practices, and a high standard of craft. ## Required Qualifications & Skills * 10 or more years of software engineering experience building and delivering production-grade applications using Java, with a clear command of data structures and object-oriented design principles. * Proven depth in cloud-native development and container orchestration, with hands-on use of tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift across multiple years of delivery. * Extensive experience designing and building microservices and service-oriented architectures, including RESTful APIs and GraphQL implementations. * Strong working knowledge of Java frameworks including Spring Boot, Quarkus, Micronaut, or Vert.x, applied across real-world software delivery. * Practical experience with software engineering best practices including unit testing, automation, design patterns, and peer code review as core parts of the development workflow. * Familiarity with CI/CD pipeline tooling such as Tekton, Harness, CircleCI, or Jenkins, in either on-premise or public cloud environments. * Multiple years of working within agile and iterative delivery frameworks, contributing actively to sprint execution and team-level Scrum practices. ## Beneficial Skills & Qualifications * Architecture experience designing horizontally scalable, highly available, and low-latency distributed systems in cloud environments such as AWS or OpenShift. * Exposure to event-driven architecture patterns and streaming technologies, including Kafka, Spark, or Flink. * Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tooling such as Terraform or CloudFormation, and API management platforms. *...