Principal Java Engineer – Vice President

Citi is looking for a hands on Principal Engineer 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.

• 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.

• 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 Open Shift 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.

• Architecture experience designing horizontally scalable, highly available, and low‑latency distributed systems in cloud environments such as AWS or Open Shift.
• Exposure to event‑driven architecture patterns and streaming technologies, including Kafka, Spark, or Flink.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tooling such as Terraform or Cloud Formation, and API management platforms.
• Experience with observability, security, and monitoring tooling including Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, ELK, or Cloud Watch.
• Experience mentoring and providing technical leadership to teams of five or more engineers, with exposure to front‑end technologies such as React or Angular…