Senior Technical Lead - Compute Services, SVP

Citigroup Inc.; London; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job description

XiP is building a next-generation cross-asset calculation system for Citi trading desks and enterprise users in the largest global financial markets and exchanges in New York, London, and other major financial hubs.

Team & Role Overview

Our team owns multiple Java Spring Boot Services that execute, partition, and track quantitative risk graphs/trades in a distributed environment. These graphs can fail due to their complexity and our system must adapt quickly to these failures to provide a seamless experience for clients.

XiP Compute Services are deployed onto OpenShift and Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). An important initiative in 2025 will be onboarding Google’s Kubernetes Engine to further expand our coverage. Our system scales on-demand, and we can run up to tens of thousands of replicas of our services across all asset classes.

The role of the Senior Technical Lead is to lead a variety of engineering activities including design decisions regarding technical direction of the platform with short, medium, and long-term changes, with a key focus on public cloud onboarding.

The project requires constant review of the technologies, patterns and paradigms used to ensure the system is easy to understand, performant, scalable, testable, robust, and observable. The role is a conjunction of technical and managerial roles, with line-management duties, while giving technical direction to a growing team of developers globally.

The platform is a Greenfield build using standard modern technologies such as Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Kafka, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Solace, Apache Ignite. The platform runs in a hybrid mode both on-premise and in AWS utilising technologies such as EKS, S3, FSX.

The main purpose of this role is to lead efforts of continued platform onboarding to AWS as well as the new initiative to deploy into GCP. The project is in a scale-out phase, with a goal of expanding the user base and workloads towards running billions of financial calculations per day across hundreds of thousands of cores. The aim of the project is to run all finance calculations for Citi’s Front Office Markets business globally.

Responsibilities:

1. Steering platform onboarding into AWS and Google Cloud, while collaborating with Citi HPC team and AWS/Google partners
2. Challenging proposed and provided solutions in terms of performance, robustness and cost effectiveness
3. Making decisions regarding technical direction of platform, including evaluating new technologies and executing proof-of-concept implementations, with good understanding of various limitations
4. Identifying and defining necessary system enhancements to improve current processes and architecture
5. Hands-on coding of fixes, features, and improvements
6. Investigating reported or observed platform issues
7. Reviewing pull-requests from other team members and giving robust critique/feedback
8. Identifying and proposing teamwork enhancements
9. Reviewing requests for new features, balancing user requirements with defending the platform from complexity and low-value features
10. Collaborating with key partners across the firm for extending the platform, such as: the infrastructure provider group; quant group; upstream and downstream systems
11. Mentoring/coaching junior developers on coding/architecture approaches and best practices

Skills and Experience:

1. Expert knowledge of distributed systems including event-driven architecture; at-least-once messaging; CAP Theorem; horizontal and vertical scaling strategies; massively distributed architectures
2. Expert knowledge of Java, JVM, memory management, garbage collection
3. Thorough understanding of multithreaded environment challenges
4. Expert knowledge of Spring, SpringBoot framework and associated technologies
5. Expert knowledge of test frameworks, such as Junit, Mockito, writing easily-testable code
6. Expertise in Java debugging, including remote debugging of services deployed to K8s
7. Expert knowledge of Kubernetes and associated technologies such as KEDA, Karpenter, ClusterAutoscaler, CoreDNS
8. Expert knowledge of SQL and/or NoSQL database technologies
9. Expert knowledge of various messaging protocols and technologies such as REST, HTTP/S, AMQP, WebSocket
10. Expert knowledge of Confluent Kafka
11. Experience and good understanding of core technologies provided by GCP/AWS, such as S3, FSX, EKS, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, AmazonMQ, DynamoDB, GKE, CloudStorage, PubSub, Filestore
12. Knowledge of modern observability technologies such as ELK, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, Micrometer
13. “What-if” thinking, while designing or reviewing solutions, to foresee or catch potential problems as early in the development process, as only possible

Nice to have:

1. Good knowledge of Python, Groovy, Bash
2. C++ basic knowledge/experience
3. Good knowledge of PubSub model
4. Good knowledge of Finance, especially large-scale risk calculation
5. Good knowledge of representing complex calculations as graphs of instructions which can be horizontally distributed

What we can offer you

We work hard to have a positive financial and social impact on the communities we serve. In turn, we put our employees first and provide the best-in-class benefits they need to be well, live well and save well.

By joining Citi London, you will not only be part of a business casual workplace with a hybrid working model (up to 2 days working at home per week), but also receive a competitive base salary (which is annually reviewed), and enjoy a whole host of additional benefits such as:

• Generous holiday allowance starting at 27 days plus bank holidays; increasing with tenure
• A discretional annual performance related bonus
• Private medical insurance packages to suit your personal circumstances
• Employee Assistance Program
• Pension Plan
• Paid Parental Leave
• Special discounts for employees, family, and friends
• Access to an array of learning and development resources

Alongside these benefits Citi is committed to ensuring our workplace is where everyone feels comfortable coming to work as their whole self every day. We want the best talent around the world to be energized to join us, motivated to stay, and empowered to thrive.

Sounds like Citi has everything you need? Then apply to discover the true extent of your capabilities.

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Job Family Group: Technology

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Job Family: Applications Development

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Time Type: Full time

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Qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.

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