Digital Assets Platform Engineering Team Lead - SVP in London

Citi is seeking a highly accomplished and visionary SVP, Digital Assets Platform Engineering Lead to spearhead the continued evolution of the Citi Integrated Digital Assets Platform (CIDAP). This is a senior leadership role requiring a rare combination of deep technical mastery, strategic thinking, and proven people leadership. The successful candidate will serve as both a technical authority and a team lead, guiding a high-performing group of engineers in the design, delivery, and operationalization of enterprise-grade blockchain and digital assets infrastructure at global scale.

This individual will be a key voice in shaping Citi's digital assets engineering strategy, working at the intersection of traditional financial services technology and the emerging decentralized ecosystem. As a SVP leader, you will operate with a high degree of autonomy, influence cross-functional outcomes, and be accountable for the platform's technical direction, engineering quality, and talent development. You will represent the engineering function to senior stakeholders across Technology, Business, Risk, and Compliance, and will be expected to translate complex technical concepts into strategic business outcomes.

The ideal candidate brings a start-up builder's mindset, a disciplined enterprise engineer's rigor, and the executive presence to lead, inspire, and align large teams across a globally distributed organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership & Architecture
  • Define and own the end-to-end technical strategy and architecture for the CIDAP platform, ensuring alignment with Citi's enterprise technology standards, risk appetite, and long-term business objectives.
  • Provide authoritative technical guidance on backend engineering (Java/Spring), Web3 infrastructure, blockchain integration patterns, and distributed systems design.
  • Champion engineering excellence across the platform — setting the bar for code quality, system resilience, scalability, and performance.
  • Evaluate and introduce emerging technologies, frameworks, and industry best practices in blockchain, digital assets, and enterprise backend engineering to keep Citi at the forefront of the space.
  • Drive architectural decisions and review critical design proposals, ensuring solutions are robust, maintainable, and aligned with organizational standards.
• Team Leadership & Talent Development
  • Lead, mentor, and develop a team of senior software engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous learning.
  • Set clear technical and professional growth expectations for direct reports; provide ongoing coaching, performance feedback, and career development guidance.
  • Recruit and retain top engineering talent, contributing to workforce planning and capability building across the digital assets engineering practice.
  • Cultivate psychological safety, inclusion, and a high-performance team culture within a globally distributed engineering environment.
• Delivery & Execution
  • Own the platform's engineering delivery commitments — accountable for on-time, on-budget, and high-quality delivery of complex, multi-workstream initiatives.
  • Drive Agile engineering practices across the team, ensuring effective sprint planning, backlog prioritization, dependency management, and retrospective-driven improvement.
  • Define and enforce engineering quality standards including test coverage, code review practices, documentation, and CI/CD pipeline discipline.
  • Proactively identify, escalate, and resolve technical risks, blockers, and cross-team dependencies to ensure project momentum and stakeholder confidence.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline required; Master's or PhD in Computer Science strongly preferred.
• Extensive progressive software engineering experience across the full software development and testing lifecycle, with demonstrated growth into senior technical leadership roles; experience within financial services or highly regulated industries strongly preferred.
• Extensive hands-on expertise in backend web application development using Java and Spring frameworks, with deep knowledge of enterprise architecture patterns, microservices, and distributed systems.
• Solid direct people management or team lead experience, with a track record of developing senior engineers and delivering outcomes through teams.
• Proven experience in Blockchain/Digital Assets application development, including blockchain integration, decentralized protocols, and tokenization frameworks.
• Proven experience architecting and delivering high-throughput, high-availability enterprise systems that meet strict standards for reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Strong proficiency in asynchronous programming paradigms and event-driven architecture patterns.
• Working knowledge of Web3 libraries (Web3J, Web3JS) and their application in enterprise contexts.
• Demonstrated familiarity with Solidity and smart contract development best practices.
• Solid understanding of DevOps principles, containerized application deployment (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm Charts), and CI/CD pipeline management.
• Practitioner-level command of Agile methodologies, Scrum, and scaled delivery frameworks.

You will gain significant experience of the technologies and businesses and engineering groups across Citi, giving you exposure to new and existing methodologies and systems as well as the opportunity to work with multiple teams around the globe. As a member of the Citi Integrated Digital Assets Platform engineering team, you will have the opportunity to work with a team of highly motivated, T-shaped, smart individuals who think out of the box and look for disruptive opportunities for commercial benefit.

Exposure to newly released and upcoming technologies and the ability to positively contribute to the strategies of the business. By working within the senior leadership team you will be highly visible across Citi and will have access to Citi’s executive management team.

This job description provides a high-level review of the types of work performed. Other job-related duties may be assigned as required.

What we’ll provide you

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
• 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.