technical architect

Job Overview

We're looking for an expert level Technical Architect 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 and automating processes & making the best tools available for our 30k engineers, saving tens of minutes per day which equates to £10,000,000s of savings.

We believe happy engineers make the best engineers and are a technology‑managed department.

Responsibilities

Own the Architecture.

You are the technical authority for the Ro D platform, defining, documenting, & evolving the platform’s architecture – from service boundaries and data models to event topology and deployment patterns.

You ensure the platform is built to last and to scale.

Drive Scalability & Reliability.

Lead the engineering effort to make Ro D elastically scalable and enterprise‑grade reliable.

Design for high availability, graceful degradation, and zero‑downtime deployments.

Define SLOs, own the SRE practice for the platform, and be accountable for fixes.

Define Observability Strategy.

Establish a comprehensive observability framework – distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics, dashboards, & alerting so the platform is fully understood at all times.

Establish End‑to‑End Testing.

Design and champion a robust E2E testing strategy across the platform, from contract testing at service boundaries to full integration & regression suites.

Lead Event‑Driven Architecture.

Evolve Ro D’s event‑driven backbone – designing resilient, decoupled event flows.

Ensure the platform’s asynchronous patterns are well‑governed, observable, and capable of supporting the firm’s growing automation ambitions.

Shape the Technical Roadmap.

Work directly with the product owner to build the right things in the right order, translating business and compliance requirements into sound architectural decisions and prioritising technical debt.

Make the team better.

Conduct thoughtful architectural reviews, mentor engineers, unblock people when they’re stuck, and share knowledge.

Stay ahead of Gen AI.

Follow emerging AI developments closely, bring new ideas to the team, and actively apply what you learn to the products we build.

Communicate effectively.

Model clear, direct, proactive communication – essential for distributed work across three continents.

Qualifications

• Proven track record as a hands‑on Technical Architect or Principal Engineer on production‑grade, high‑traffic platforms.
• Deep expertise in enterprise architecture patterns – microservices, event‑driven systems, distributed systems design.
• Hands‑on experience with event‑driven architecture and message queuing systems, particularly Apache Kafka.
• Strong server‑side engineering skills: Kotlin (primary development language), designing, building, and consuming domain‑specific RESTful services & APIs.
• Proficiency with relational and/or No SQL databases: Postgre SQL, Mongo DB or Couchbase.
• Demonstrated SRE or platform engineering experience – SLOs, incident management, reliability engineering at scale.
• Experience defining and implementing observability strategies: distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics, and alerting.
• Proven experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers.
• We value multi‑disciplined polyglot engineers but also support specialisms across the wider department.

• Additional desirable skills

• Experience with SDLC tooling, release management platforms, or CI/CD pipeline architecture.
• Familiarity with Service Now integrations or ITSM workflow automation.
• Contract‑first API design, such as Open API/Swagger.
• Understanding of containerisation (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools and automated deployments: Tekton, Harness or equivalent.
• Familiarity with automated governance, compliance‑as‑code, or policy‑as‑code approaches.
• Experience with scalability & observability at enterprise scale.
• Comfortable collaborating with product, design, UI engineers, product managers, and other stakeholders.
• AI experience highly desirable but not mandatory.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary (annually reviewed).
• 27 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Discretional annual performance‑related bonus.
• Private Medical Care & Life Insurance.
• Employee Assistance Program.
• Pension Plan.
• Paid Parental Leave.
• Special discounts for employees, family, and friends.
• Hybrid working model – up to 2 days working at home per week.
• Access to time‑saving AI tools such as Git Hub Copilot, Cognition. ai’s Devin and Claude Code.
• Opportunity to work on a new venture and actively drive change in a high‑impact team.
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