Principal Engineer

The Principal Engineer is a strategic professional who closely follows latest trends in own field and adapts them for application within own job and the business. Typically, a small number of people within the business that provide the same level of expertise. Excellent communication skills required in order to negotiate internally, often at a senior level. Developed communication and diplomacy skills are required in order to guide, influence and convince others, in particular colleagues in other areas and occasional external customers. Accountable for significant direct business results or authoritative advice regarding the operations of the business. Necessitates a degree of responsibility over technical strategy. Primarily affects a sub-function. Responsible for handling staff management issues, including resource management and allocation of work within the team/project.

Responsibilities:

• Accountable for influencing the technology strategy for Digital team in alignment with Citi Technology. As such, collaborate to help create reliable, scalable, and high-performance services and architectures. Through these efforts, develop cohesive interpersonal working relationships with all peers and team members. “It’s all about teamwork.”

• Architect and deliver end-to-end technical solutions across the digital platform, from core client-facing APIs through to integrations and supporting infrastructure.

• Set and enforce engineering standards across the team — championing clean code, SOLID principles, and disciplined design practices that reduce technical debt and improve long-term maintainability.

• Lead design reviews, proof-of-concept initiatives, and technical experiments that evaluate new approaches and establish the best path forward for platform evolution.

• Translate complex system requirements into clear, well-structured software design artifacts that guide consistent, high-quality implementation across engineering teams.

• Guide and mentor engineers at all levels on what good code and good design look like in practice, through hands-on collaboration, pairing, and direct technical coaching.

• Coordinate technical delivery across internal and cross-functional teams, owning estimation, solution planning, and implementation leadership for concurrent initiatives.

• Embed resilience and high-availability thinking into every layer of the architecture, ensuring platform reliability at the scale Citi's client's demand.

• Manage technical risk with transparency and pragmatism, identifying issues early and communicating clearly to protect delivery timelines and platform integrity.

• Help drive the organization's transition to AI-augmented engineering — embedding AI coding assistants, agentic development workflows, and automated test and review generation into daily delivery; and establishing the standards, guardrails, and evaluation criteria that let teams move quickly and safely.

• Champion AI fluency across the organization as a practice pusher — establishing internal standards, reusable frameworks, reference architectures, and best practices; advising teams on tooling and technique selection; and building the upskilling paths that turn engineers into effective orchestrators, reviewers, and validators of AI-generated work.

• Qualifications:

• 10 or more years of hands-on design and development experience, with deep Java expertise and a demonstrable commitment to clean code and SOLID engineering principles.

• Week to Week will involve some coding, mentoring, and cross-team delivery co-ordination. Significant coding isn't the expectation as we use AI for coding. We do need applicants who can code, so they know when AI is coding correctly or it is hallucinating

• Practical experience building medium to large-scale applications using Spring Boot, Microservices, Open-Shift, Public Cloud and Event Driven technology stacks.

• Design & deliver core client-facing APIs and infrastructure

• Set and enforce engineering standards (SOLID, clean code, TDD/BDD)

• Lead design reviews and proof-of-concept initiatives

• Translate system requirements into software design artifacts

• Mentor and technically coach engineers at all levels

• Co-ordinate technical delivery across internal and cross-functional teams

• Embed resilience, HA, and high-throughput thinking into every layer

• Own technical risk, estimation, and solution planning

• Clear, confident communicator who can articulate technical decisions and surface delivery risks effectively to both engineering and non-technical audiences.

• NICE TO HAVE: Strong knowledge in applied AI for building software and products: LLMs and frontier-model APIs, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings and vector search, agent and tool-use patterns, prompt and context engineering, and LLM evaluation and observability (emphasis on consuming and integrating AI services.

Education:

• Bachelor’s/University degree, Master’s degree preferred

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In addition to salary, Citi’s offerings may also include, for eligible employees, discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards. Citi offers competitive employee benefits, including: medical, dental & vision coverage; 401(k); life, accident, and disability insurance; and wellness programs. Citi also offers paid time off packages, including planned time off (vacation), unplanned time off (sick leave), and paid holidays. For additional information regarding Citi employee benefits, please visit citibenefits.com. Available offerings may vary by jurisdiction, job level, and date of hire.

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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.

Illinois residents – AI Notice and Right

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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.

Salary : $169,600 - $254,400