Developer Enablement, Technical Architect – Release on Demand (SVP) in London

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/automating processes & 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 in and around our SDLC and the automation journey we are on. Initially we are looking for a strong, hands on technical architect for our strategic Release automation platform (Release on Demand) but we support opportunities to extend your sphere of influence across various related up and downstream platforms which is highly encouraged.

Release on Demand (RoD) is our strategic release management platform and the primary focus of this role. Built internally approximately three years ago, the platform has quickly become our strategic release generation and deployment tool used across all lines of business. Last year it generated 60k releases and automated the deployment of approximately 75% of them. We expect its user base and release volume to double again this year such is the enterprise’s drive to automated and strategic tooling.

RoD is more than a release tool — it is a codified governance engine, embedding compliance controls, SDLC guardrails, and DORA best practices directly into the delivery pipeline. It enables teams to move quickly whilst maintaining quality gates to ensure the correct SDLC and procedural requirements of the firm are upheld. As the platform's footprint grows rapidly, so does its architectural complexity — and the need for a world-class architect to ensure it scales with confidence.

The platform is a cornerstone of automated governance within the SDLC and software delivery space. There are many ongoing initiatives to support further SDLC automations, and the wider team is expanding. We need a highly skilled architect to ensure the platform's solidity, availability, and continued evolution.

SDLC Automation is a greenfield initiative that builds on the success we've had in automating the SDLC and takes it further. This blue-sky project looks at ways we can greatly improve the SDLC process at Citi. The use of Artificial Intelligence is planned to further automate and remove manual human-led processes that add toil to the SDLC process. Your architectural thinking will help shape both initiatives.

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 team, in an organisation led by technologists and use 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, and that means navigating some legacy alongside building the future.
• If you want everything perfect on day one, this isn't the right fit. If you want to help us get there, keep reading.

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:

• Own the Architecture. You are the technical authority for the RoD platform. That means defining, documenting, and 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 built to scale.
• Drive Scalability & Reliability. Lead the engineering effort to make RoD 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 when things need fixing.
• Define the Observability Strategy. Establish a comprehensive observability framework — distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics, dashboards, and alerting. The platform must be fully understood at all times. You will set the standard and ensure the team can operate with confidence.
• 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 and regression suites, you will ensure the team can ship with confidence and catch regressions before they reach production.
• Lead Event-Driven Architecture. Evolve RoD'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. You'll have a real voice in our architecture and technical roadmap. You'll work directly with the product owner to make sure we're building the right things, in the right order, for the right reasons — translating business and compliance requirements into sound architectural decisions and prioritising technical debt appropriately.
• Make the team better. Thoughtful architectural reviews. Mentoring engineers. Unblocking people when they're stuck. Sharing what you know. Your success here is tied to the team's success, not just your own output.
• Stay ahead of GenAI. This space moves fast. We need someone who follows it seriously, brings new ideas back to the team, and actively applies what they're learning to the products we build.
• Communicate like it matters. We're distributed across three continents. Clear, direct, proactive communication isn't a soft skill here. It's how the work gets done. You'll model it.

What you should have:

• A selection of the tools and capabilities required across our platforms. We value multi-disciplined polyglot engineers but also understand and support the need for specialisms too across the wider department.
• 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 is our primary development language. Designing, building and consuming domain specific RESTful services & APIs.
• Proficiency with relational and/or NoSQL databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB 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.

Highly Desirable skills:

• Experience with SDLC tooling, release management platforms, or CI/CD pipeline architecture.
• Familiarity with ServiceNow integrations or ITSM workflow automation.
• Contract-first API design, such as OpenAPI / 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.
• SRE/DevOps — experience with scalability & observability at enterprise scale.
• Comfortable collaborating with product, design, and UI engineers, product managers, and other stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver robust platform solutions.
• 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 there will be new challenges that will help you develop new skills that can drive your career.

By joining Citi London, you will not only be part of a business casual workplace with a hybrid working model (up to 2 days working at home per week), but also receive a competitive base salary (which is annually reviewed), and enjoy a whole host of additional benefits such as:

• 27 days annual leave (plus bank holidays).
• A 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.

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.