Java Technical Lead - Vice President

Senior Java Developer is a position responsible for establishing, designing, and implementing scalable, high-performance application systems and services in close coordination with the Business and Technology teams. The overall objective of this role is to provide strong technical leadership, drive hands-on system analysis and architecture, and lead programming activities to expand and modernize the Onboarding Management & Coordination (OMC) technology platform.

A key function within Banking and International Clients Technology is the global client onboarding process at Citi. Our team is responsible for the enterprise platform that orchestrates mission-critical client onboarding workflows across multiple business domains, including Legal, Credit, KYC/AML, and Account Opening. We empower clients and operations teams with real-time event-driven information, interactive tools, and robust APIs to automate, streamline, and accelerate end-to-end onboarding lifecycles.

We are looking for a talented, hands-on senior technologist with deep expertise in modern Java, Spring Boot, and Apache Kafka to help build the next generation of our global Client Onboarding Platform while driving performance and architectural excellence across the existing ecosystem. This role offers high visibility, technical ownership, and significant opportunity to shape how we serve our global institutional clients.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the hands-on architecture, design, and development of mission-critical, high-throughput microservices using modern Java (Java 17/21), Spring Boot, and RESTful/event-driven APIs
• Architect and implement robust event-driven workflows and real-time streaming data pipelines using Apache Kafka (producers, consumers, partitions, schemas, and fault-tolerant message processing)
• Design and implement highly concurrent, low-latency solutions utilizing advanced multithreading, concurrency patterns, and JVM performance tuning
• Write clean, testable, maintainable, and secure code following modern software engineering best practices, design patterns, and enterprise security standards
• Lead end-to-end SDLC activities from architectural design, technical specification, and implementation through to automated testing, CI/CD pipeline integration, and production deployment
• Design and optimize data persistence layers across relational databases (Oracle, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL/document stores (MongoDB) ensuring data integrity, optimized indexing, and efficient querying
• Continuously monitor, profile, and optimize application performance, reliability, and resilience using distributed tracing, metrics, and observability tools
• Partner with Solution Architects, Product Owners, and cross-functional engineering teams to define system enhancements, evaluate technical trade-offs, and deliver complex business workflows
• Investigate, troubleshoot, and resolve high-impact technical challenges in distributed production environments, leading root-cause analyses and permanent remediation
• Provide technical leadership, establish coding standards, conduct comprehensive peer code reviews, and mentor mid-level and junior developers across the team

Qualifications:

• Minimum 10+ years of hands-on enterprise Application Development experience with strong backend engineering expertise
• Deep, expert-level proficiency in Core Java (Java 11/17/21), object-oriented design, collections, memory management, and multithreading/concurrency models
• Extensive hands-on experience building and deploying production-grade microservices using the Spring ecosystem (Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA/Hibernate, Spring Security, Spring Cloud)
• Strong hands-on expertise with Apache Kafka and Event-Driven Architecture, including topic design, consumer groups, offset management, message serialization, and event streaming patterns
• Proven experience in designing, building, securing, and versioning scalable RESTful APIs
• Strong database skills working with relational databases (e.g., Oracle, PostgreSQL) including query optimization, indexing, and transactions, as well as document stores (e.g., MongoDB)
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, caching strategies, and resilient design patterns (Circuit Breaker, Saga, Outbox, Retry/Backoff)
• Hands-on experience with automated unit and integration testing frameworks (JUnit 5, Mockito, Testcontainers)
• Familiarity with containerization and cloud platforms (Docker, Kubernetes / Red Hat OpenShift) and modern CI/CD deployment pipelines
• Exposure to Kotlin is a significant advantage
• Demonstrated technical leadership, excellent analytical and debugging skills, and strong verbal and written communication abilities

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree/University degree or equivalent experience
• Master’s degree preferred

This job description provides a high-level review of the types of work performed. Other job-related duties may be assigned as required.

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Job Family Group:

Technology

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Job Family:

Applications Development

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Time Type:

Full time

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Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

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Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

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Citi is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified candidates will receive consideration without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.

 

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