Lead Java Platform Engineer – Payments

Citi

Lead engineering for Citi's cheque payment platform as a hands-on Senior Java Developer. Drive platform strategy, AI integration, and engineering excellence in a hybrid work environment.

Posted 6/10/2026full-timeNew Castle • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $156,160 - $234,240 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudDockerGrafanaJavaKafkaKubernetesMicroservicesMongoDBNoSQLOpenShiftOracleReactSpringSpring BootSpringBootSQL

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Actively code in Java developing reusable frameworks while performing system design, architecture reviews, and code reviews for the core cheque payment platform.
Contribute to the design of distributed, fault-tolerant, real-time systems for high-volume, low-latency transaction processing.
Write, review, and refactor production-grade code in Java setting a high technical standard for the team.
Independently design event-driven, microservices-based architectures utilizing REST APIs, Java and React.
Apply hands-on experience with Kafka, including message schema design, topic partitioning, consumer group strategies, and fault-tolerant processing.
Design and govern data architecture across Oracle (SQL) and MongoDB (NoSQL), covering schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, and data consistency patterns.
Champion continuous development, feature flags, and progressive delivery, contributing to the design and optimization of CI/CD pipelines.
Maintain and enforce engineering standards within the scrum team, including Test-Driven Development (TDD), reusable framework development, CI/CD, secure coding, and observability.
Conduct code reviews for critical platform components, providing detailed technical feedback to enhance team quality and capacity, ensuring the development of scalable and reusable services.
Drive the adoption of AI-powered quality practices, including leveraging tools like GitHub Copilot for coding, utilizing LLMs (Gemini experience preferred) to improve payment processing quality, and implementing automated test script generation and vulnerability remediation.
Lead performance engineering initiatives, including profiling JVM-based applications identifying performance hotspots, and optimizing critical settlement processing paths.
Own the security and compliance posture of the cheque payment platform by participating in threat modeling, vulnerability assessments, and secure design reviews.
Ensure all engineering delivery aligns with Citi Engineering Excellence Standards, including CI/CD, DevOps, cloud-native practices, and modern ways of working.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Extensive hands-on experience in high-throughput, production-grade Java engineering, including JVM performance tuning.
Hands-on experience building RESTful APIs with frameworks such as Spring MVC or Spring Boot.
Proven experience designing microservices ecosystems, including service decomposition, API design, inter-service communication, and cloud engineering.
Deep, hands-on expertise in Kafka, including topic design, partitioning, consumer groups, exactly-once semantics, and high-throughput stream processing.
Hands-on experience with profiling and optimization, including JVM tuning, garbage collection (GC) optimization, thread management, and memory profiling.
Practical experience designing resilience patterns such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, failover, and disaster recovery.
Hands-on expertise in Oracle (SQL) and Microsoft SQL for schema design, query optimization, and indexing, as well as MongoDB (NoSQL) for document modeling, aggregation pipelines, sharding, and replica sets.
Hands-on experience with OpenShift/AWS, Kubernetes, and Docker for container orchestration, autoscaling, and cloud-native deployment.
Experience designing and owning CI/CD pipelines aligned with enterprise-level Engineering Excellence Standards.
Hands-on experience with distributed tracing, intelligent alerting, and AI-driven observability using tools like Grafana.
Practical experience with threat modeling, vulnerability assessments, and secure design reviews.
Experience with Agile/SAFe delivery at the program level, including PI planning, cross-team dependency management, and delivery governance.

Benefits

Comp & perks

medical, dental & vision coverage
401(k)
life, accident, and disability insurance
wellness programs
planned time off (vacation)
unplanned time off (sick leave)
paid holidays

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

JavaREST APIsKafkaOracle SQLMongoDBJVM performance tuningMicroservicesCI/CDTest-Driven Development (TDD)Profiling and optimization

Soft Skills

LeadershipCollaborationTechnical feedbackProblem-solvingCommunication