Digital Asset Platform Engineering Team Lead - SVP
About the Role
Citi's Integrated Digital Asset Platform (CIDAP) represents the firm's foundational infrastructure for digital finance - a mission-critical, globally distributed platform operating at the intersection of institutional financial services and next-generation technology. We are seeking an exceptional senior engineering leader to serve as SVP, Team Lead, with full accountability for the platform's engineering resilience, strategic observability posture, and end-to-end production operations lifecycle across a complex, multi-stakeholder ecosystem.
This is a strategic leadership mandate. You will architect the firm's approach to platform hardening, define the engineering standards that govern CIDAP's long-term reliability, and serve as the senior engineering authority across internal and external partner relationships. You will be expected to lead through influence, elevate engineering culture, and translate complex technical realities into clear, consequential decisions for senior business and technology leadership.
Responsibilities
- Orchestrate alignment across senior engineering, business, operations, and compliance leadership to ensure platform capabilities integrate with enterprise-wide strategic objectives; proactively identify systemic gaps and champion programs to deliver scalable product and process transformation
- Define and own the long-term strategic roadmap for CIDAP platform hardening, resilience, and operational maturity - translating engineering priorities into business cases and executive-level recommendations
- Serve as the senior architectural authority for CIDAP, ensuring all design decisions, technology choices, and implementation patterns align with Citi's strategic architecture blueprint and enterprise standards
- Establish, enforce, and continuously evolve rigorous engineering standards across the full software development lifecycle - encompassing architectural design patterns, coding standards, testing frameworks, and secure implementation practices
- Define and drive the strategic roadmap for platform resilience, including advanced observability frameworks, self-healing architectures, fault tolerance, disaster recovery capabilities, and comprehensive monitoring infrastructure
- Ensure CIDAP consistently meets institutional-grade uptime, performance, and reliability commitments through disciplined engineering investment and proactive risk mitigation
- Assume executive ownership of the complete incident management lifecycle across L1, L2, and L3 support tiers, with full accountability for root cause analysis, strategic remediation, post-incident reviews, and systemic prevention programs
- Define and govern SLAs, KPIs, and escalation frameworks that reflect institutional production standards and partner expectations
- Drive resolution of the most consequential and complex technical challenges - including systemic platform risks, cross-domain integration failures, and critical production incidents - through rigorous, first-principles analysis of business processes, system behavior, and industry-leading standards
- Cultivate and govern strategic relationships with internal business partners, external technology providers, and production support organizations
- Serve as the primary engineering liaison at senior leadership forums, articulating complex technical risk, capability roadmaps, and investment rationale with clarity and executive presence
- Exercise senior judgment in assessing and managing risk across all platform engineering decisions; champion full compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and Citi policy frameworks
- Maintain full transparency in escalating, managing, and reporting control issues; model exemplary ethical conduct and ensure all platform practices safeguard Citi, its clients, and the firm's institutional reputation
- Provide inspirational leadership, coaching, and mentorship to senior engineers, architects, and team leads; establish high-performance engineering culture and career development frameworks that attract and retain top-tier talent
- Allocate responsibilities with intentionality to maximize individual growth and collective platform impact
- Drive the creation and governance of comprehensive technical knowledge assets - including architectural decision records, operational runbooks, incident postmortems, and engineering best-practice repositories - ensuring organizational resilience and continuity
Requirements & Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Information Systems, or a directly related engineering discipline; advanced degree (M.S., M.Eng., or MBA) strongly preferred
- Extensive progressive experience in enterprise-scale software engineering with a demonstrable trajectory into senior technical leadership
- Proven experience in a role with direct accountability for platform reliability, production operations, or enterprise architecture at institutional scale
- Proven history of leading high-severity incident management programs with executive-level accountability and cross-functional ownership
- Prior experience in financial services, fintech, or regulated digital asset environments strongly advantageous
- Deep, hands-on expertise in Java / Spring Boot (essential)
- Advanced command of distributed systems design, microservices architecture, and API governance
- Advanced proficiency in enterprise Linux/Unix environments
- Strong command of networking protocols (TCP/IP, DNS) and enterprise API frameworks
- Experience with cloud-native or hybrid deployment architectures (Kubernetes, OpenShift, or equivalent)
- Sophisticated understanding of SRE principles, chaos engineering, and advanced observability patterns including metrics, distributed tracing, and centralized logging
- Demonstrated experience designing and implementing platform recoverability and self-healing frameworks at institutional scale
- Familiarity with ITIL-aligned change and incident management processes
Leadership Competencies & Executive Skills
- Exceptional executive communication - written and verbal - with the ability to engage credibly with audiences from team level through to C-suite, regulators, and external partners
- Demonstrated ability to translate long-horizon platform strategy into executable engineering programs with measurable institutional impact
- Proven track record of building and elevating high-performing engineering organizations through mentorship, structure, and a culture of accountability
- Demonstrated success in cross-functional leadership without direct authority, influencing outcomes across organizational and geographic boundaries
- Proactive, principled approach to identifying and managing systemic risk across platform, people, and process dimensions - with full regulatory and ethical awareness
- Ability to synthesize complex engineering realities into clear, compelling narratives for senior business leadership, audit, and compliance audiences
- Strong strategic planning, organizational development, and resource allocation capabilities
- Ability to identify emergent technology opportunities within the digital asset space and create adoption pathways that advance Citi's competitive and operational position
Development Value:
You will gain significant experience of the technologies and businesses and engineering groups across Citi, giving you exposure to new and existing methodologies and systems as well as the opportunity to work with multiple teams around the globe. As a member of the Citi Integrated Digital Assets Platform engineering team, you will have to opportunity to work with a team of highly motivated, T-shaped, smart individuals who think out of the box and look for disruptive opportunities for commercial benefit.
Exposure to newly released and upcoming technologies and the ability to positively contribute to the strategies of the business. By working within the senior leadership team you will be highly visible across Citi and will have access to Citi’s executive management team.
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Job Family Group:
Technology------------------------------------------------------
Job Family:
Applications Development------------------------------------------------------
Time Type:
Full time------------------------------------------------------
Primary Location Full Time Salary Range:
€119,760.00 - €179,640.00------------------------------------------------------
Most Relevant Skills
Please see the requirements listed above.------------------------------------------------------
Other Relevant Skills
For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.------------------------------------------------------
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