Engineering Lead – Payments Sanctions Platform

About Citi:
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.
As a bank with a brain and a soul, Citi creates economic value that is systemically responsible and in our clients' best interests. As a financial institution that touches every region of the world and every sector that shapes your daily life, our Enterprise Operations & Technology teams are charged with a mission that rivals any large tech company. Our technology solutions are the foundations of everything we do from keeping the bank safe, managing global resources, and providing the technical tools our workers need to be successful to designing our digital architecture and ensuring our platforms provide a first-class customer experience. We reimagine client and partner experiences to deliver excellence through secure, reliable, and efficient services.
Our commitment to diversity includes a workforce that represents the clients we serve from all walks of life, backgrounds, and origins. We foster an environment where the best people want to work. We value and demand respect for others, promote individuals based on merit, and ensure opportunities for personal development are widely available to all. Ideal candidates are innovators with well-rounded backgrounds who bring their authentic selves to work and complement our culture of delivering results with pride. If you are a problem solver who seeks passion in your work, come join us. We'll enable growth and progress together.
About the Team:
The Engineering Lead – Payments Sanctions Platform is a senior-level individual contributor and technical architect trusted to define the architectural direction of Citi's sanctions screening infrastructure within the payments ecosystem at one of the world's most consequential financial institutions.
This is not a role for those content with maintaining the status quo. The ideal candidate brings a rare combination of deep technical mastery and systems-level thinking — someone who can architect resilient, AI-powered microservices that power real-time sanctions screening across high-volume payment transactions, and translate that work into meaningful outcomes for Citi's clients, regulators, and partners across the globe. As a senior technical leader on the Payments Sanctions Platform team, this professional will be at the forefront of Citi's compliance technology evolution, shaping platforms that are not only performant and secure, but self-healing, intelligent, and built to withstand the highest regulatory scrutiny.
In this role, the successful candidate will operate at the intersection of deep technical expertise and informal leadership — collaborating with cross-functional teams, compliance and sanctions officers, product owners, and senior stakeholders to deliver solutions that are as accurate as they are resilient. They will drive the adoption of cutting-edge methodologies, mentor and advise engineers across the team, and ensure every technical decision reflects Citi's unwavering commitment to regulatory compliance, resilience, and client trust. This is an opportunity to build something that matters — at a scale few institutions can offer, while remaining hands-on with the architecture and technology itself.
Responsibilities:
Lead integration of functions to meet goals, deploy new sanctions screening capabilities, and enhance real-time transaction screening workflows
Analyze complex business processes, system processes, and sanctions/regulatory standards (e.g., OFAC, EU, UN, and other applicable sanctions lists; watchlist screening protocols) to define and develop solutions to high-level problems
Serve as the senior technical expert on sanctions platform architecture, providing advanced technical guidance on assignments involving large budgets, cross-functional projects, or multiple concurrent initiatives within the payments sanctions domain
Develop application methodologies and architectural standards for program analysis, design, coding, testing, debugging, and implementation of sanctions screening capabilities
Apply advanced knowledge of core system flows and comprehensive knowledge of multiple platform areas to achieve technology goals across the sanctions screening platform
Consult with compliance officers, sanctions/AML teams, and business stakeholders to identify system function specifications and incorporate them into overall system design
Allocate work and act as a technical advisor/coach to developers, analysts, and new team members, without formal people-management responsibility
Influence and negotiate with senior leaders, compliance stakeholders, and external parties on technical direction and architectural decisions
Appropriately assess risk when business decisions are made, demonstrating particular consideration for the firm's reputation and safeguarding Citigroup, its clients and assets, by driving compliance with applicable laws, rules and regulations, adhering to Policy, applying sound ethical judgment regarding personal behavior, conduct and business practices, and escalating, managing and reporting control issues with transparency
Resilient Microservices Architecture: Design and build fault-tolerant, loosely coupled microservices using patterns like circuit breakers, bulkheads, and active-active replication to ensure 99.99% continuous availability for mission-critical, real-time sanctions screening of payment transactions
AI-Driven Self-Healing & False-Positive Reduction: Integrate AI/ML models for predictive scaling, real-time anomaly detection, automated self-healing, and intelligent false-positive reduction in watchlist screening matches, proactively mitigating system failures and screening inefficiencies
Event-Driven Screening Pipelines: Develop high-throughput, event-driven architectures (e.g., using Apache Kafka) that seamlessly ingest and screen payment/transaction data against sanctions watchlists in real time, without compromising core service availability or introducing screening delays
Sanctions Regulatory & Operational Risk: Ensure platform design and engineering practices support compliance with applicable sanctions regulations and standards (e.g., OFAC, EU, UN sanctions regimes), as well as broader payments regulations such as PCI-DSS and AML/KYC transaction monitoring
Qualifications:
10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with a strong track record of individual technical contribution in enterprise-grade payments, sanctions screening, or financial crime compliance systems
Demonstrated Subject Matter Expert (SME) in applications development using Java technologies, including Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and reactive programming frameworks, applied within payments or sanctions/compliance screening platforms
Proficiency in programming languages including Java, Python, with deep hands-on experience designing, building, and maintaining enterprise-scale sanctions screening or payments platforms across complex distributed systems
Experience designing and implementing resilient microservices architectures using patterns such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, and active-active replication to achieve continuous, high-availability performance for mission-critical, real-time screening workloads
Experience with event-driven and message-based architectures using Apache Kafka or equivalent platforms, including the design and operation of high-throughput, real-time transaction screening data pipelines
Working knowledge of sanctions screening concepts, including watchlist matching engines, fuzzy-matching/false-positive reduction techniques, and applicable sanctions regimes (e.g., OFAC, EU, UN)
Understanding of the payments processing lifecycle (authorization, clearing, settlement, reconciliation) and how sanctions screening integrates into that flow, along with associated risk, fraud, and compliance considerations
Strong knowledge of CI/CD tools including Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, with experience automating build, test, and deployment workflows in regulated payments or compliance environments