Head of Personal Loans Core Platforms and Lending Integrations - Director

Citigroup Inc.; Jacksonville (FL); On-site; USD 170,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical

Dental & Vision

401(k)

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

Wellness programs

Paid time off

Paid holidays

Incentive programs

Job summary

Citi is seeking a highly experienced engineering leader to head USCC Personal Loans Core Platforms and Lending Integrations in Jacksonville, FL. You will drive end-to-end API integration platforms across Lending and Commerce to scale value cards, lending, and related services.

Expect ownership of architecture, standards, and hands-on contribution where needed. The role demands 15+ years in senior engineering leadership, deep API expertise, and a track record of delivering enterprise-grade

Qualifications

• 15+ years of relevant experience in senior engineering or technology leadership.
• Significant API integration, lending, or commerce platform experience.
• Proven track record building enterprise-grade APIs and architectures.
• Strong leadership and talent development capabilities.
• Experience with cloud, containerization, CI/CD, and IaC.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery and evolution of Personal Loans Core and Lending API integrations across platforms.
• Define target-state architecture and engineering standards; review designs and guide engineers.
• Lead large-scale software solutions with long-term impact across value, lending, and commerce platforms.
• Contribute code and drive engineering excellence through best practices and reviews.
• Oversee API workflows, security, controls, and regulatory alignment across systems.

Skills

API integration

Lending systems

Commerce platforms

RESTful APIs

GraphQL

Event-driven architectures

Microservices

Security best practices

Leadership

Strategic thinking

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree (preferred)

Tools

AWS/Azure/GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Brief Description of the Organization

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Our mission is to serve as a trusted partner to our clients by responsibly providing financial services that enable growth and economic progress. We strive to earn and maintain our clients' and the public's trust by constantly adhering to the highest ethical standards and making a positive impact on the communities we serve.

Citi's Personal Banking and Wealth Management (PBWM) division is building a purpose-driven team to serve its globally diverse, digitally forward customers in top cities around the world. We're looking for exceptional candidates who think digitally and differently, resolve problems in unconventional ways and strive to provide a remarkable experience for our clients. We define success by our Citi Leadership Principles: We Take Ownership, We Deliver with Pride and We Succeed Together.

Overview of the Role

The Head of USCC Personal Loans Core Platforms and Lending Integrations is accountable for the execution and delivery of next-generation API integration platforms across value proposition, lending, and commerce ecosystems. This role owns a critical engineering function responsible for building scalable, secure, and compliant integration platforms that support Value Cards, Lending and Commerce business in USCC. The individual applies deep technical expertise and strong business understanding to translate strategic priorities into enterprise-grade API integration solutions.

This is a highly technical leadership role, requiring the individual to actively drive architecture, influence low-level design, and guide implementation through principal and senior engineers. The role is expected to set engineering standards, define technical guardrails, and contribute hands-on where required, including the ability to review, prototype, and write production-grade code to unblock teams or validate approaches.

Operating within a highly regulated environment, this role is responsible for end-to-end platform delivery, operational stability, and risk alignment, while managing multiple teams and influencing outcomes across a matrixed organization. The position requires balancing innovation in API-driven integrations with strong governance, control frameworks, and production reliability.

The role has direct accountability for engineering delivery, people leadership and financial management while influencing cross-functional stakeholders across product, risk and external partners. It plays a key role in advancing Citi's value cards, Lending and Commerce capabilities through modern engineering practices, platform reuse, and scalable ecosystem integration. Typically, a direct report to a C16/MD role and functions as an integral member of the functional leadership team within a country/site location, job family, or line of business.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Delivery & Engineering Excellence

• Own delivery and ongoing evolution of Personal Loans Core and Lending API integration for Lending domain, ensuring systems are scalable, resilient, and aligned with business priorities. Drive execution across multiple teams and manage interdependencies to deliver consistent, high-quality outcomes.

• Provide direction on target-state architecture and engineering standards, including API-first and event-driven design, microservices architecture, and secure integration patterns. Actively engage in design reviews, challenge assumptions, and guide principal engineers in solving complex technical problems.

• Lead the design, implementation, and successful delivery of large-scale or significantly difficult software solutions that have a long-term impact on products, technology, or architecture across value, lending, and commerce platforms.

Technical Leadership & Innovation

• Design approaches and personally contribute code that is noteworthy in some way (e.g., a significant refactor that simplifies or improves architectural quality, enables competitive advantage, offers significant extensibility, performance, scalability, or has organization-wide operational excellence impact). Identify and tackle intrinsically hard problems (e.g., highly complex, ambiguous, undefined, with less existing structure, or having significant business or security risk or potential for significant impact).

• Deliver artifacts that set the standard within your organization for engineering excellence, from designs to algorithms to implementations. Your personal code submissions and reviews of other people's code are instructive and make the overall code corpus better.

• Lead and actively participate in design reviews, aligning teams across your organization towards coherent architectural strategies. You bring clarity to complexity, probe assumptions, illuminate pitfalls, and foster shared understanding.

Domain-Specific Responsibilities

• Oversee development of API integration workflows for value proposition services, lending capabilities, and commerce platforms, including authentication, authorization, transaction orchestration, and third-party integrations. Ensure solutions are built with appropriate controls, auditability, and alignment to regulatory and risk requirements.

• Lead engineering efforts supporting seamless integration with internal and external systems, including partner APIs, data platforms, and core banking systems. Drive development of real-time integration capabilities and data-driven solutions to enhance customer and business outcomes.

• Keep abreast of industry trends. You effectively research and benchmark our technology against other competing software in the industry. You understand that many problems are not essentially new.

Risk, Compliance & Operational Excellence

• Ensure adherence to Citi's risk and control framework, including data privacy, regulatory compliance, and secure development practices. Maintain accountability for platform integrity, traceability, and operational readiness.

• 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, as well as effectively supervise the activity of others and create accountability with those who fail to maintain these standards.

People Leadership & Talent Development

• Lead and develop engineering teams with responsibility for hiring, performance, and career development, while managing budget and resource allocation. Influence stakeholders across technology and business to align delivery with strategic objectives.

• Actively recruit as well as participate in the hiring/interview process. Play a significant role in the career development of others, actively mentoring and educating the larger SDE community on trends, technologies, and best practices.

• You are a pragmatic problem solver, applying judgment and experience to balance trade-offs between competing interests. You are flexible, adapting your approach to meet the needs of the team, project, and product.

Strategic Contribution

• Contribute to intellectual property (e.g., invent, submit patents, etc.) that advances Citi's competitive position in API integration and digital platform capabilities.

• Full management responsibility for multiple teams, including management of people, budget and planning, to include duties such as performance evaluation, compensation, hiring, disciplinary actions and terminations and budget approval.

Qualifications

Experience Requirements

• 15+ years of relevant experience in a senior Engineering or Technology leadership role

• Significant experience building complex business and/or transactional models, particularly in API integration, lending systems, or commerce platforms. Has thrived and succeeded in delivering high quality technology products/services in a high growth environment where priorities shift rapidly.

• Proven track record of designing and implementing enterprise-grade API architectures, including RESTful APIs, GraphQL, event-driven architectures, and microservices patterns

• Deep expertise in integration patterns, including synchronous and asynchronous communication, message queuing, API gateways, and service mesh technologies

Leadership & Business Acumen

• First-class leadership and influencing skills, including experience managing a Software Engineering Team. Demonstrated interpersonal and talent management skills, including the ability to identify and develop engineering talent.

• Ability to use hard data and metrics to back up assumptions and develop business cases

• Excellent communication skills required in order to negotiate internally, often at a senior level. Some external communication/negotiation may be necessary.

Technical Expertise

• Experience with modern technology stacks including cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code

• Strong understanding of security best practices for API development, including OAuth, JWT, API key management, encryption, and threat modeling

• Knowledge of financial services domain, particularly in lending, payments, and commerce platforms

• Experience with API management platforms and integration middleware solutions

Education

• Bachelor's/University degree required, Master's degree preferred in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field

Job Family Group:

Technology

Job Family:

Applications Development

Time Type:

Full time

Primary Location:

Jacksonville Florida United States

Primary Location Full Time Salary Range:

$170,000.00 - $300,000.00

• medical
• dental & vision coverage
• 401(k)
• life, accident, and disability insurance
• wellness programs
• planned time off (vacation)
• unplanned time off (sick leave)
• paid holidays
• discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards

For additional information regarding Citi employee benefits, please visit citibenefits.com. Available offerings may vary by jurisdiction, job level, and date of hire.

Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

Anticipated Posting Close Date:

Aug 18, 2026

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

Citi is an equal opportunity employer,