Citi
Citi
Citi is a global banking and financial services company serving consumers, corporations, governments, and institutions. Its offerings span consumer banking, credit cards, wealth management, corporate banking, and investment banking, supported by operations in more than 100 countries. As a large international finance organization, Citi brings together teams working across banking, financial services, and fintech.

Senior Engineering Lead, Payments Sanctions Platform – Citi, Tampa Hybrid

Lead the architecture of resilient, AI-enabled sanctions-screening microservices at Citi. Drive real-time payment compliance through Kafka-based processing, regulatory controls, and highly reliable platform engineering.

Description

  • Lead cross-functional integration, launch sanctions-screening capabilities, and improve real-time transaction-screening workflows
  • Evaluate business and technology processes alongside sanctions and regulatory standards to shape effective solutions
  • Provide senior technical leadership for sanctions-platform architecture across large-scale, concurrent, cross-functional initiatives
  • Establish architecture standards and delivery methods covering analysis, design, coding, testing, debugging, and implementation
  • Apply advanced platform expertise to deliver technology objectives
  • Partner with compliance officers, sanctions and AML teams, and business stakeholders to define system specifications and designs
  • Assign work and mentor developers, analysts, and new team members
  • Shape technical direction with senior leaders, compliance stakeholders, and external partners
  • Identify and manage regulatory, operational, reputational, and control risks
  • Architect fault-tolerant microservices targeting 99.99% continuous availability
  • Apply AI and machine learning to predictive scaling, anomaly detection, self-healing, and false-positive reduction
  • Build high-throughput, Kafka-based event-driven screening pipelines
  • Align engineering practices with sanctions, payments, PCI-DSS, and AML/KYC requirements

Requirements

  • At least 10 years of hands-on software engineering experience with enterprise payments, sanctions-screening, or financial-crime compliance systems
  • Subject-matter expertise in Java, including Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and reactive programming frameworks
  • Proficiency in Java and Python
  • Experience designing resilient microservices with circuit breakers, bulkheads, and active-active replication
  • Experience building event-driven and message-based systems with Apache Kafka or comparable platforms
  • Working knowledge of sanctions screening, watchlist matching engines, fuzzy matching, and false-positive reduction
  • Understanding of payment-processing lifecycles and related risk, fraud, and compliance considerations
  • Strong experience with Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, and GitHub Actions
  • Proficiency with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle, or Redis, including performance tuning, query optimization, and schema design
  • Experience using AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude, or Devin
  • Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, the ELK Stack, or Splunk
  • Strong systems-analysis capabilities
  • Ability to lead informally, mentor, and advise engineers without direct people-management responsibility
  • Familiarity with OFAC, EU and UN sanctions regimes, PCI-DSS, and AML/KYC transaction monitoring is a plus
  • Bachelor's or university degree, or equivalent experience
  • A master's degree is preferred

Benefits

  • Discretionary and formula-based incentive and retention awards
  • Medical, dental, and vision coverage
  • 401(k) plan
  • Life, accident, and disability insurance
  • Wellness programs
  • Paid time off, including vacation, sick leave, and paid holidays

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