Principal Java Engineer – Vice President

Citi is looking for a hands- n Principal Java Engineer at Vice President level 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.

• Experience with observability, security, and monitoring tooling including Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, ELK, or CloudWatch.

• Experience mentoring and providing technical leadership to teams of five or more engineers, with exposure to front-end technologies such as React or Angular and database concepts across RDBMS and NoSQL.

What We Offer

Joining Citi means working at the intersection of technology and global finance, where the software you build has real impact at scale. You will be part of a high-performing engineering community that values technical craft, collaborative problem-solving, and continuous professional growth — with the tools, support, and flexibility to do your best work.

• Hybrid working model with 3 days in the office and 2 days working remotely, giving you structure and flexibility in equal measure.

• Access to Citi's global engineering community, where you can contribute to technical forums, share expertise, and shape engineering standards beyond your immediate team.

• Meaningful technical challenges at scale, with the opportunity to influence architecture and engineering direction across a portfolio of products used worldwide.

• Ongoing learning and development opportunities, including access to emerging technologies such as AI, to keep your skills at the leading edge of the industry.

• Competitive financial wellbeing package, including salary, bonus, and a comprehensive suite of benefits tailored to your location.

• Wellbeing and family support programmes designed to help you maintain a sustainable and rewarding work-life balance.

Apply now to bring your Java engineering expertise to Citi and help shape the technology powering one of the world's leading global financial institutions.