Remote Technical Lead — Cloud, Microservices & Architecture

First Citizens; Raleigh (NC); Remote; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

First Citizens Bank seeks a Technical Lead to join our Personal & Business Banking Digital Engineering team. This remote role may be hired in AX, NC, NJ, or TX, and emphasizes hands-on engineering leadership, coding, and architectural influence to deliver scalable digital banking capabilities.

The role focuses on partnering with Product Owners, Architects, and engineering teams to ensure secure, resilient platforms, while mentoring engineers and guiding enterprise-aligned technical strategy

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience delivering enterprise-scale applications.
• 2+ years in a Technical Lead, Senior Engineer, Lead Developer, or equivalent role.
• Deep understanding of modern software architecture and distributed systems.
• Strong experience leading technical discussions and influencing decisions across teams.
• Balance strategic thinking with hands-on execution.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across one or more Agile pods delivering customer-facing digital banking capabilities.
• Drive engineering excellence and promote modern software development practices.
• Act as the primary technical point of contact between development teams and engineering leadership.
• Translate architectural direction into actionable delivery plans and technical implementation strategies.
• Ensure solutions align with enterprise architecture standards, security requirements, and platform roadmaps.
• Facilitate technical discussions, design reviews, code reviews, and architectural decision-making.
• Identify and proactively address technical risks, bottlenecks, and dependencies.
• Remain actively involved in software design, development, troubleshooting, and delivery activities.
• Contribute high-quality production code across backend services, APIs, integrations, and digital platforms.
• Lead by example through hands-on participation in complex technical implementations.
• Partner with engineers to resolve production issues and performance challenges.
• Drive adoption of coding standards, engineering best practices, and reusable design patterns.
• Review and approve technical designs, pull requests, and implementation approaches.
• Design scalable, resilient, cloud-ready, and event-driven solutions.
• Collaborate with enterprise and domain architects to define future-state architectures.
• Lead technical solutioning for new digital banking products, customer journeys, and platform enhancements.
• Promote API-first and event-driven architecture principles across the organization.
• Drive microservices adoption, integration strategies, and system modernization initiatives.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and identify opportunities for innovation.
• Work with Product Managers, Business Analysts, Scrum Masters, and Engineers to deliver business value.
• Participate in backlog refinement, technical estimation, sprint planning, and release planning.
• Ensure technical requirements and non-functional requirements are understood and prioritized.
• Coordinate cross-team dependencies and technical integrations.
• Support execution of large-scale initiatives spanning multiple engineering teams.
• Champion automated testing, quality engineering practices, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with Quality Engineering teams to improve automation coverage and product quality.
• Drive improvements in application reliability, performance, scalability, and observability.
• Promote shift-left testing and DevSecOps throughout the SDLC.
• Implement and monitor engineering metrics focused on quality, delivery, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Mentor and coach software engineers across experience levels.
• Foster engineering ownership, learning, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Help teams navigate complex technical decisions and implementation challenges.
• Influence technical direction through collaboration, not authority.
• Act as a trusted advisor to engineering managers, architects, and senior technology leaders.
• Maintain healthy engineering velocity; remove obstacles.
• Improve software quality and platform resilience; enable better tech decisions.
• Strengthen architecture consistency across pods.
• Manage tech debt through modernization efforts; improve operational stability.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

REST APIs

Event‑Driven

Kafka

Microservices

Distributed systems

Secure development

Excellent communication

Stakeholder management

Hands-on coding

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering

Tools

GitHub

Azure DevOps

Kubernetes

Terraform

SonarQube

CI/CD pipelines

OpenAPI

Job description

First Citizens Bank seeks a Technical Lead to join our Personal & Business Banking Digital Engineering team. This remote role may be hired in AX, NC, NJ, or TX, and emphasizes hands-on engineering leadership, coding, and architectural influence to deliver scalable digital banking capabilities.

The role focuses on partnering with Product Owners, Architects, and engineering teams to ensure secure, resilient platforms, while mentoring engineers and guiding enterprise-aligned technical strategy