Senior Java Platform Engineer — Senior Vice President

Job d:

Location:

Tampa, Florida, United States Salary: $ - $Category:
Technology, Applications Development, Professional Company:
Citi Citi is looking for a Senior Java Platform Engineer to lead the engineering of a global check payment platform at the heart of the Payments Platform and Cheque Processing Transformation Initiative. This is a senior role that blends deep, hands-on Java engineering with platform strategy ownership you will write and review production code, shape the architecture of distributed payment systems, and guide a scrum team to deliver mission-critical capabilities across the full payment lifecycle.

Your work will directly influence the reliability, scalability, and modernisation of a platform that processes high-volume financial transactions globally.

Responsibilities Design and build production-grade Java microservices for a high-volume, low-latency global check payment platform, including hands-on coding, architecture reviews, and code reviews that set the technical standard for the team.

Architect event-driven, fault-tolerant distributed systems using Kafka, Spring Boot, and RESTful APIs, covering message schema design, topic partitioning, consumer group strategies, and exactly-once processing.

Define and govern data architecture across Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and MongoDB, driving schema design, indexing strategies, query optimisation, and data consistency across transactional and settlement workflows.

Own the engineering roadmap for modernising the check payment platform, migrating mainframe and monolithic legacy components into reusable, cloud-native microservices aligned to Citi Engineering Excellence Standards.

Lead platform performance engineering by profiling JVM-based applications, identifying and resolving bottlenecks, and optimising critical settlement processing paths to meet SLA commitments on availability, throughput, and latency.

Embed AI-powered engineering practices across the team by leveraging tools such as Git Hub Copilot and LLMs (including Gemini) to improve code quality, automate test generation, and accelerate vulnerability identification and remediation.

Act as the primary engineering point of contact for the Check Processing pillar, communicating platform health, delivery progress, and engineering strategy clearly to senior business, technology, and operations stakeholders.

Own the platform's security and compliance posture by leading threat modelling, vulnerability assessments, and secure design reviews to ensure the platform meets regulatory and risk requirements.

Required qualifications & skills
10 or more years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a people management or senior engineering leadership capacity.

Extensive hands-on Java engineering experience in high-throughput, production environments, including JVM performance tuning, GC optimisation, thread management, and memory profiling.

Hands-on design of microservices architectures using Spring Boot or Spring MVC, covering service decomposition, RESTful API design, inter-service communication, and cloud-native deployment.

Deep practical expertise in Kafka, including topic design, partitioning strategies, consumer group management, and high-throughput stream processing with exactly-once semantics.

Hands-on database engineering across Oracle and Microsoft SQL (schema design, query optimisation, indexing) and MongoDB (document modelling, aggregation pipelines, sharding, replica sets).Hands-on experience with cloud-native infrastructure including Open Shift, AWS, Kubernetes, and Docker, covering container orchestration, autoscaling, and CI/CD pipeline design using tools such as Jenkins, Gradle, and Maven.

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field or equivalent practical experience.

Beneficial skills & qualifications

Familiarity with agentic AI frameworks such as Lang Chain or Auto Gen, RAG patterns, or vector databases such as Pinecone or Weaviate, applied in an enterprise or regulated context.

Hands-on Python experience in data pipelines, AI/ML integration, scripting, or automation within a financial services or high-throughput engineering environment.

Experience leading large-scale legacy modernisation programmes, including migration of mainframe components written in COBOL, Assembler, or C++ into cloud-native microservices.

Knowledge of MLOps practices including model versioning, deployment pipelines, and production model monitoring, alongside real-time ML model serving techniques.

Experience with chaos…