Lead Java Developer

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., GitHub 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 Hat OpenShift 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 DevOps teams to enhance automated CI/CD pipelines (Git, Jenkins/Tekton, SonarQube, 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, OpenTelemetry, 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, Avro/JSON schema registry).
• Database & Data Modeling: Strong proficiency in Oracle Database (SQL, PL/SQL, query execution plan analysis, indexing strategies, connection pooling, and performance optimization).
• Cloud & Container Ecosystem: In-depth knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift (deployments, services, configs/secrets, ingress, pod lifecycle, Helm).
• AI-Assisted Development: Experience utilizing AI developer tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, AI-driven code generation, automated test scaffolding, and refactoring assistants) to enhance engineering velocity and team efficiency.
• Testing & Quality Assurance: Advanced experience with JUnit 5, Mockito, Testcontainers, mutation testing, and static analysis tools (SonarQube, Checkmarx).
• Build & CI/CD Tooling: Proficient with Maven/Gradle, Git, Jenkins/Tekton pipelines, and modern DevOps release management.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Demonstrated experience acting as a technical team lead, scrum tech lead, or lead engineer guiding engineering teams.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to navigate ambiguous, complex legacy systems into modern target states.
• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills with the capability to interface effectively with business stakeholders, architecture review boards, and distributed engineering teams.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree/University degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.
• Master’s degree preferred.

This job description provides a high-level review of the types of work performed. Other job-related duties may be assigned as required.

------------------------------------------------------

Job Family Group:

Technology

------------------------------------------------------

Job Family:

Applications Development

------------------------------------------------------

Time Type:

Full time

------------------------------------------------------

Primary Location Full Time Salary Range:

$120,800.00 - $170,800.00

------------------------------------------------------

Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

------------------------------------------------------

Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

------------------------------------------------------

Automated Processing and AI

We use automated processing, including artificial intelligence, for our legitimate business interests (or our reasonable and appropriate business purposes) to identify and align the candidate's skills and abilities with a specific job opening. Additionally, if you so choose, or consent, we can match your skills and abilities to other suitable roles at Citi.

Importantly, all our hiring processes and decisions, including determining your suitability for a role, are conducted, checked, and decided by individuals. Our automated processing and AI do not involve relying on automatic or autonomous decision-making. Please refer to any Jurisdictional Considerations, with specific provisions for your country (where relevant) for further details.

------------------------------------------------------

This job opening is for an existing job vacancy.

------------------------------------------------------

Citi is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified candidates will receive consideration without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.

If you are a person with a disability and need a reasonable accommodation to use our search tools and/or apply for a career opportunity review Accessibility at Citi.

View Citi’s EEO Policy Statement and the Know Your Rights poster.