Developer Enablement, Java/Kotlin Software Engineer (SVP) in London

We’re looking for an expert level server side engineer to join one of our high-impact teams inside Citi’s CTO organisation. You’ll sit within Developer Enablement, a group focused on innovation, developer platforms and internal tools used across the bank, where we experiment and ship fast, like a startup inside a global bank. Our mission is to drive productivity by streamlining/automating processes and make the best tools available for our 30k engineers. At Citi’s scale saving tens of minutes per day equates to £10,000,000s of savings.

There are many exciting opportunities for you, and flexibility to move between multiple projects if that’s something you’d enjoy. Two closely related key strategic projects will require your expertise driving solutions:

• SDLC Automation – a greenfield initiative building on our success in automating the SDLC, taking it further by improving grading engineering teams, rewarding best practices, moving from manual approval to automatic, and planning Artificial Intelligence to further automate and remove manual processes.
• Release on Demand (RoD) – a strategic release management platform that makes it trivial to generate production run books & ServiceNow Changes with the click of a button. Built internally approximately three years ago, the platform has become our strategic release generation and deployment tool. Last year it generated 60k releases and automated the deployment of approx. 65% of them. RoD enables cultural change within development teams while maintaining quality gates to ensure the correct SDLC and procedural requirements are upheld.

Why you’ll love working here:

• You get to work in the engineering focused part of the bank, the Chief Technology Office, building tools for other engineers.
• You’ll work and lead small, agile teams, in an organisation led by technologists and using the latest AI tooling to complete your work.
• You’ll impact the daily experience of tens of thousands of engineers at one of the largest engineering organisations in the world.
• Our culture runs on engineering craftsmanship. Leadership here actually understands what that means.
• We’re proving what’s possible inside a large organisation, navigating legacy while building the future.
• The team is distributed across Belfast, Canada & London. You’ll work closely with engineers across time zones and partner directly with product and platform leadership.

What you will do:

• Write code and lead. You’re the technical anchor for our backend services, contributing high-quality code, setting the bar through your own work.
• Own the hard stuff. Core platform capabilities such as background jobs, autonomous agents, and services that keep everything running.
• Build for reliability and performance, and be accountable when fixing issues.
• Shape how we build. You’ll have a real voice in our architecture and technical roadmap, working directly with the product owner to ensure we build the right things, in the right order, for the right reasons.
• Stay ahead of GenAI. Bring new ideas from experiments with models, tooling, or patterns to the team and apply them to our products.
• Make the team better. Thoughtful code reviews, unblocking people, sharing knowledge – your success is tied to the team’s success.
• Communicate like it matters. You’ll model clear, direct, proactive communication across three continents.

What you should have:

• A selection of tools and capabilities across our platforms; we value multi‑disciplined polyglot engineers but also support specialisms.
• Proven experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers.
• Deep, hands‑on experience building and running production‑grade services, still writing code regularly.
• Strong server‑side engineering skills: Kotlin or Java (Java 21), building and consuming RESTful APIs.
• Proficiency with relational and/or NoSQL databases: Couchbase, PostgreSQL or MongoDB.

Highly Desirable skills:

• Experience with event‑driven architecture.
• Experience with microservice architecture.
• Contract first APIs, such as swagger.
• Experience with message queuing systems: Apache Kafka.
• SRE/DevOps – experience with scalability & observability.
• Understanding of containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools and automated deployments.
• Comfortable collaborating with product, design, and UI engineers, product managers and other stakeholders.
• AI experience is highly desirable but not mandatory.

Tools you’ll use (depending on role):

• Server: Kotlin, Java, Spring Boot, http4k, ktor, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Apache Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Tekton, Harness.
• Infra: OpenShift, Tekton, Harness.
• Mac or PC – it’s up to you.
• Access to time‑saving AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cognition.ai’s Devin and Claude Code.

What we’ll provide you:

This is a unique role that will put you in the position to be part of a new venture and actively drive change. Every day will present new challenges that develop competence and career growth. Joining Citi London offers a hybrid working model (up to two days working at home per week) and competitive base salary (annually reviewed), plus benefits including:

• 27 days annual leave (plus bank holidays).
• Discretionary annual performance‑related bonus.
• Private medical care & life insurance.
• Employee assistance program.
• Pension plan.
• Paid parental leave.
• Special discounts for employees, family and friends.

Citi is an equal‑opportunity employer and qualified candidates will receive consideration without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you have a disability and need a reasonable accommodation to use our search tools and apply for a career opportunity, please review Accessibility at Citi.