FX STIRT Technology - Senior Software Engineer (SVP)

The STIRT Engineering Lead is a London‑based Senior Vice President responsible for the hands‑on design, architecture, and implementation of the full front‑to‑back technology platform supporting the STIRT business. This role sits at the intersection of engineering excellence and business partnership, requiring deep engagement with traders, quants, and stakeholders across FX and Rates desks.

The role demands a technically deep, hands‑on engineering leader with strong expertise in capital markets systems, responsible for driving the strategic evolution of STIRT technology — spanning curve construction, RFQ and pricing workflows (for FX and Interest Rate Derivatives) — while managing a globally distributed engineering team. The successful candidate will own the end‑to‑end technology vision for STIRT, eliminating fragmentation across trading units and delivering a modern, high‑performance, resilient platform that enables traders to operate with speed, precision, and confidence. Central to this vision is the active adoption and integration of AI and machine learning capabilities to augment trader workflows, accelerate engineering productivity, and unlock new analytical possibilities across the STIRT business.

Role Overview – What you will do

• Trader Engagement & Stakeholder Management
  • Serve as the primary technology partner for STIRT traders, building trusted relationships and acting as the first point of contact for all technology needs across FX and Rates desks.
  • Conduct regular structured engagement sessions with traders to capture workflow pain points, prioritise enhancements, and translate business requirements into actionable engineering deliverables.
  • Partner with Desk Heads, Quants, Sales, Operations, and Risk to ensure technology solutions are aligned with front‑to‑back business objectives.
  • Communicate technical strategy, delivery progress, and risk in clear, business‑relevant terms to senior stakeholders including Trading Management and Technology leadership.
  • Represent STIRT Technology in cross‑functional forums, governance committees, and strategic planning sessions.
  • Develop and maintain a comprehensive understanding of the full STIRT front‑to‑back workflow.
• Strategic Architecture & Design
  • Define and own the target‑state technical architecture for the STIRT platform, covering all components from market data ingestion through to trade booking and risk reporting.
  • Lead architectural decisions on system decomposition, data flow design, API contracts, event‑driven patterns, and integration with upstream/downstream systems.
  • Drive the modernisation and consolidation of legacy STIRT systems, establishing a clear migration roadmap that minimises disruption to live trading.
  • Evaluate and govern technical trade‑offs across build vs. buy, latency vs. throughput, consistency vs. availability, and monolith vs. microservices dimensions.
  • Ensure the architecture meets both functional requirements (pricing accuracy, workflow completeness, feature richness) and non‑functional requirements (latency, throughput, resilience, observability, security, and regulatory compliance).
• AI Tools Usage & Adoption
  • Champion the strategic adoption of AI and Generative AI tools across the STIRT engineering organisation, identifying high‑value use cases that meaningfully improve trader workflows, engineering productivity, and analytical capabilities.
  • Drive the evaluation, piloting, and scaled deployment of AI‑assisted development tools (e.g., code generation, automated code review, test generation) to accelerate delivery velocity and improve code quality across the team.
  • Actively participate in hands‑on development, including writing, reviewing, and architecting production‑grade code for high‑performance, low‑latency trading systems.
• Team Leadership & Delivery
  • Manage and mentor a globally distributed team of engineers.
  • Conduct performance evaluations, support career development, and lead hiring and disciplinary processes.
  • Integrate in‑depth knowledge of applications development with the broader Technology function to achieve established goals.

Key Skills and Experience Required

• Experience
  • Extensive experience in software engineering within capital markets or financial services, with significant hands‑on development experience in high‑performance, distributed systems.
  • Proven hands‑on expertise in building low‑latency, high‑throughput trading systems — capable of writing, reviewing, and debugging production code alongside the team.
  • Deep domain knowledge of markets businesses — including Short‑Term Interest Rates, FX, or broader FX and Rates/Credit markets — with a strong understanding of curve construction, RFQ/pricing workflows, and electronic trading.
  • Proven track record of defining and delivering strategic architecture for large‑scale, mission‑critical financial platforms, including system modernisation and legacy decommissioning programmes.
  • Experience managing and mentoring global engineering teams across multiple time zones.
  • Strong background in stakeholder management and trader engagement, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into business‑relevant language.
  • Demonstrable experience evaluating, adopting, or delivering AI/ML capabilities within a financial services or trading technology context, including familiarity with model governance and responsible AI practices.
• Technical Skills
  • Strong proficiency in Java — including core Java (JVM internals, concurrency, memory management), modern frameworks (Spring Boot), and experience building low‑latency, high‑throughput applications.
  • Proven system design and architecture skills — including large‑scale distributed systems, microservices, event‑driven architectures, and real‑time data pipelines (e.g., Solace, KDB, in‑memory data grids such as Couchbase).
  • Market data and pricing systems — experience with real‑time market data feeds, curve construction engines, and pricing libraries.
  • AI/ML tooling and frameworks — working knowledge of LLM APIs, agentic frameworks, ML inference pipelines, and AI‑assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Devin or Claude Code, or equivalent); experience integrating AI capabilities into production systems is strongly preferred.
  • Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, cloud‑native technologies, and containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes).
  • Working knowledge of observability tooling — distributed tracing, metrics, and log aggregation (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, OpenTelemetry).
• Leadership & Communication
  • Demonstrated ability to remain hands‑on as a technical leader — capable of diving into code, debugging production issues, and driving architectural decisions alongside the team.
  • Strong stakeholder management skills — experienced in influencing and negotiating with senior leaders across Technology and the Business.
  • A growth mindset towards AI — actively curious about emerging AI capabilities and able to inspire the same curiosity and rigour in the broader engineering team.

Benefits

• Annual leave (27 days plus bank holidays).
• Discretional annual performance‑related bonus.
• Private medical care and life insurance.
• 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.

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