Vice President – Principal Software Engineer & Technical Lead (Payments Domain)

Vice President – Principal Software Engineer & Technical Lead (Payments Domain)

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly technical, hands-on Vice President (VP) – Principal Software Engineer & Technical Lead to drive the architecture, design, and implementation of our next-generation, high-throughput, low-latency payments platform.

The payments landscape is undergoing rapid transformation, requiring systems that are not only highly secure and compliant but also exceptionally resilient and capable of processing millions of transactions with sub-second latency. This role is designed for a premier technical authority who remains deeply hands-on in coding while possessing the leadership gravitas to own critical platform components and mentor engineering teams globally.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Resilient Distributed Design: Architect, design, and evolve highly available, active-active, fault-tolerant distributed systems capable of handling massive transaction volumes with zero data loss.
• Low-Latency Optimization: Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks across the application, network, and database layers to achieve ultra-low latency processing.
• Cloud-Native Evolution: Drive the transition toward cloud-compatible and cloud-native architectures, ensuring applications are optimized for containerized environments (Kubernetes/OpenShift) and public/hybrid cloud deployments.
• Technical Governance: Define and enforce engineering standards, design patterns, and security best practices across the global payments engineering organization.

2. Hands-on Engineering & Delivery

• Core Development: Lead by example by writing clean, robust, maintainable, and highly optimized production-ready code in Java for core framework components and critical business logic.
• Prototyping & POCs: Conduct Proof of Concepts (POCs) for emerging technologies and architectural patterns to validate scalability, performance, and security assumptions.
• Code Quality & Reviews: Conduct rigorous, constructive code reviews, ensuring adherence to SOLID principles, security standards, and performance benchmarks.

3. Global Team Ownership & Mentorship

• Global Ownership: Take end-to-end ownership of delivery for key payment modules, coordinating seamlessly across product management, operations, infrastructure, and security teams globally.
• Mentorship & Talent Development: Actively mentor, coach, and inspire senior and junior engineers across global hubs. Foster a culture of technical curiosity, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.
• Collaboration: Bridge the gap between complex business requirements and technical execution, translating product roadmaps into scalable technical designs.

Required Technical Skills & Experience

1. Core Technology Stack

• Java Expertise: Deep, authoritative knowledge of Core Java (Java 17/21+), including advanced multi-threading, concurrency utilities, memory management, JVM profiling, and performance tuning.
• Microservices Architecture: Proven track record of designing and implementing domain-driven, loosely coupled microservices using Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, or equivalent frameworks.
• Event-Driven Architecture (Kafka): Extensive experience with Apache Kafka for high-throughput messaging, event streaming, partition strategies, consumer group management, and ensuring exactly-once processing semantics.
• NoSQL Databases (MongoDB): Strong experience with MongoDB at scale, including document modeling, indexing strategies, aggregation pipelines, sharding, replication, and performance optimization.

2. Architecture & Design Patterns

• Distributed Systems Patterns: Practical experience implementing patterns such as CQRS, Event Sourcing, Saga Pattern, Circuit Breakers, Rate Limiting, and Outbox Pattern.
• Resilience & Observability: Experience designing for "five nines" (99.999%) availability. Proficiency with distributed tracing, logging, and monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry).
• CI/CD & DevOps: Strong familiarity with modern CI/CD pipelines, declarative infrastructure (Terraform), containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes/OpenShift).

3. Domain Knowledge

• Payments Domain: Deep understanding of payment processing lifecycles, clearing and settlement networks, transaction security (cryptography, tokenization, PCI-DSS compliance), and messaging standards (e.g., ISO 20022, SWIFT, ACH, Real-Time Payments).

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Global Mindset: Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to influence and collaborate with cross-functional teams across different cultures and time zones.
• Problem Solving: Strong analytical and debugging skills, with a calm and methodical approach to resolving complex production incidents in distributed environments.
• Execution Focus: A bias for action and a proven track record of delivering complex, multi-year engineering initiatives on time and with high quality.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Experience:
  • 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a significant focus on backend distributed systems.
  • 4+ years of experience in a technical leadership or principal engineering role, guiding architectural decisions and mentoring teams.
  • Prior experience in the financial services, fintech, or payments industry is highly preferred.

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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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