Lead Engineer - Compute Service, Senior Vice President

We are seeking a Lead Engineer to head the next generation XiP Compute Service (XCS2) team. The team works across both Java and Python, and significant experience in at least one of these languages is required. 

In this role you will design, build, and maintain the future engine room of Citi's enterprise-scale XiNG Platform (XiP). You will be working on a Greenfield build of a major new component. The current generation of the product is responsible for 1.5 billion risk calculations at Citi every day. The next generation of the product is expected to double the customer base and bring in huge new workloads. 

You will work closely with other software engineers, DevOps, and our customers to define technical strategy and ensure the reliable, secure, and scalable operation of the platform. 

Responsibilities: 

Take a lead in defining the long-term strategic direction of XiP: 

Apply your experience and skills to develop next generation of the XiP Compute Service — making it faster, utilising resources more efficiently, and scaling to even greater sizes. This means adding new features without impacting platform performance in an undesirable manner; small changes multiplied by millions of calculations carry a high cost. It also means solving hard engineering problems, such as transferring small amounts of data to a huge number of machines with minimal overhead. 

Collaborate with Stakeholders to Define Platform Capabilities:  

Partner closely with key business stakeholders, product owners, and end-users to deeply understand their requirements, define the platform's capabilities, and translate business needs into technical specifications and solutions. Drive the implementation of these capabilities, ensuring they align with strategic objectives and deliver maximum business value.  An essential skill will be assessing user requirements against the overall strategy of the application – to ensure to maintain a balance between user needs and application philosophy.  This will mean explaining to senior clients that some of their requests will not be accepted, and crucially why. 

Take on the day-to-day leadership of the development team responsible for the next generation of XiP: 

Lead the team's Agile/Scrum ceremonies, including sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives, to ensure a smooth and effective development workflow. Manage the project backlog, prioritize tasks, and coordinate development efforts to align with the product roadmap and strategic goals. Provide hands-on technical leadership, guiding the team in architectural decisions, enforcing coding standards, and performing code reviews to maintain high-quality, robust, and scalable code. 

Serve as advisor or coach to team members, allocating and overseeing work: 

Mentor and guide developers, providing technical advice, code reviews, and career development support. Allocate tasks based on skill sets and project priorities, ensuring balanced workloads and timely delivery. Foster a collaborative and growth-oriented team environment, encouraging best practices and continuous learning. 

Implement the new generation of Citi's Risk Calculation Engine: 

Participate in the design, development, and implementation of the next version of the XiP Risk Calculation Engine, focusing on understanding and fulfilling the needs of new platform customers.  

The current generation of the platform regularly parallelizes 250,000 hours of compute into a single 90-minute execution. The new platform needs to maintain this performance while enabling new workloads. 

Qualifications: 

Professional software development experience with Java or Python. 

Solid experience with common frameworks and tooling (e.g. Spring, Spring Boot, Quarkus  in Java. Or Flask, FastAPI, Pydantic in Python). 

Exposure to cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes). 

Experience designing, building, and maintaining large-scale, distributed systems. 

Experience with RESTful API design and implementation. 

Exposure to NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra) is a plus. Experience with unit testing, integration testing, and test automation frameworks. 

Experience working in Agile/Scrum development environments. 

Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices is a plus. 

Education: 

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.