Lead Java Developer, Vice President

Overview of the Role  Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments, and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.
The Applications Development Technology Lead Analyst (Lead Java Developer) is a senior-level position responsible for leading the architectural design, implementation, and continuous modernization of robust, highly available, and scalable enterprise application systems. This role combines hands-on engineering in modern Java ecosystems (Java 17+, Spring Boot, Kafka, Cloud Native) with technical team leadership, architectural governance, and leveraging modern AI-assisted engineering tools to drive developer productivity.

Key Responsibilities  Technical Leadership & Team Mentorship   Act as the technical lead and mentor for an agile development pod; conduct thorough code reviews, enforce engineering standards, and coach engineers in modern design patterns and clean code principles.
Drive sprint technical planning, work allocation, backlog grooming, and technical risk assessment in partnership with Product Owners and Project Managers.
Champions continuous improvement by adopting modern engineering methodologies, test-driven development (TDD), and GenAI-powered developer productivity tools (e.g., Git Hub Copilot) to accelerate delivery and enhance code quality.
Architecture, Design & Development   Lead the end-to-end design and delivery of resilient, cloud-native microservices architectures using  Java 17+  and  Spring Boot (3.x) .
Architect high-throughput, low-latency event-driven systems utilizing  Apache Kafka  (topic partitioning, consumer group management, schema registries, and idempotent processing).
Design and optimize relational persistence layers on  Oracle Database , including complex data modeling, schema migrations (Flyway/Liquibase), advanced query tuning, index optimization, and transaction management via JPA/Hibernate.
Establish secure, robust RESTful APIs and asynchronous integration endpoints adhering to enterprise security standards and API governance.
Cloud Native, Containerization & CI/CD   Drive containerization and deployment strategies using  Docker ,  Kubernetes , and  Red Head Open Shift  across hybrid and enterprise cloud environments.
Define and implement scalable deployment manifests, Helm charts, health check probes, horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA), and zero-downtime deployment strategies (blue-green / canary).
Partner with Dev Ops teams to enhance automated CI/CD pipelines (Git, Jenkins/Tekton, Sonar Qube, Artifactory, Snyk) with automated quality gates and security scans.
Quality, Reliability & Observability   Promote rigorous automated testing practices, establishing high test coverage with  JUnit 5 ,  Mockito , integration testing ( Testcontainers ), and contract testing.
Implement comprehensive telemetry, centralized logging, distributed tracing, and monitoring using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Open Telemetry, and Splunk/Loki.
Resolve complex, high-impact production and performance bottlenecks through heap/thread dump analysis, JVM tuning, and profiling.
Governance, Risk & Controls   Appropriately assess risk when business decisions are made, demonstrating particular consideration for the firm's reputation and safeguarding Citigroup, its clients, and assets.
Ensure strict adherence to secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) practices, regulatory standards, vulnerability management, and architecture governance policies.
Qualifications & Skill Set  Core Technical Experience    6-10 years  of professional experience in software engineering and enterprise applications development.
Java 17+ Expertise:  Deep hands-on experience with modern Java (Java 17/21), including records, sealed classes, pattern matching, concurrency/multi-threading, memory management, and modern garbage collectors (G1, ZGC).
Spring Framework & Microservices:  Extensive experience designing and building enterprise microservices with  Spring Boot 4.x , Spring Cloud, Spring Data JPA, Spring Security, and distributed caching.
Event-Driven Architecture & Messaging:  Proven track record implementing scalable streaming solutions using  Apache Kafka  (producers/consumers, error handling, dead-letter queues,…