Principal Engineer Senior Vice President

About the role

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.

Requirements

• 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.

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.

Benefits

• Hybrid working model designed to support both deep focus and strong team collaboration.
• A senior technical platform where your architectural decisions and engineering standards directly influence how global payment systems are designed, built, and scaled.
• Exposure to genuinely complex, mission-critical engineering challenges across a high-performing global technology function — the kind that demand precision, creativity, and deep expertise.
• Access to continuous learning and professional development opportunities, including staying connected to the latest technologies such as Generative AI and putting them into practice.
• A performance-driven team environment that values growth mindset, pragmatic problem-solving, and engineers who take ownership of outcomes end to end.
• Competitive compensation and financial wellbeing benefits calibrated to the seniority and strategic impact of the role.
• Wellbeing support and work-life balance initiatives that help you perform at your best over the long term.
• Medical, dental & vision coverage; 401(k); life, accident, and disability insurance; and wellness programs.
• Paid time off packages, including planned time off (vacation), unplanned time off (sick leave), and paid holidays.

Pay

Full Time Salary Range: $176,720.00 - $265,080.00. In addition to salary, Citi’s offerings may also include, for eligible employees, discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards.

Schedule

Full time

Primary Location: Jersey City, New Jersey, United States