Senior Backend Principal Engineer: Enterprise API Leader

Remote Jobs; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Citi is seeking a Senior Backend Principal Developer to lead backend architecture for an enterprise-scale platform serving hundreds of thousands of clients daily. You will drive technical direction, mentor engineers, and own critical services including authentication, routing, and data integration.

The role requires hands-on design and implementation of secure, scalable microservices, with experience in IAM, SSO, Docker, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud environments.

Qualifications

• 8-12 years in backend software development with large-scale enterprise platforms.
• Proven Lead/Principal role with hands-on coding and technical leadership.
• Expert in modern Java backend frameworks and microservices.
• Experience with IAM, SSO protocols, and fine-grained authorization.
• Cloud-native development, Docker, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud exposure.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and strategic direction for backend platforms.
• Design and maintain high-performance, scalable backend services and APIs.
• Define evolving backend architecture for security, reliability and maintainability.
• Implement robust security measures including SSO and entitlements.
• Mentor developers, review code, and promote engineering best practices.
• Collaborate with product, frontend, and infra teams to deliver features end-to-end.
• Lead root-cause analysis for critical production issues.

Skills

Backend architecture

Java backend

Distributed systems

RESTful APIs

IAM & SSO

Cloud-native

Docker

Kubernetes

OAuth2/OpenID Connect

Security best practices

Education

Bachelor’s degree / equivalent

Master’s degree preferred

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Cloud (GCP/AWS)

Relational & NoSQL DBs

Unix

Job description

Citi is seeking a Senior Backend Principal Developer to lead backend architecture for an enterprise-scale platform serving hundreds of thousands of clients daily. You will drive technical direction, mentor engineers, and own critical services including authentication, routing, and data integration.

The role requires hands-on design and implementation of secure, scalable microservices, with experience in IAM, SSO, Docker, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud environments.