Lead Data Developer - VP

Benefits and culture

Join a leadership role at Citi that prioritizes real time risk data capabilities, mentoring, and cross team collaboration. The position is onsite in New York, with a competitive annual compensation ranging from USD 142,320 to 213,480, along with a robust benefits package and opportunities to shape high-performance data platforms.

• Discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards
• Medical, dental & vision coverage
• 401(k)
• Life, accident, and disability insurance
• Wellness programs
• Paid time off packages (vacation, sick leave, paid holidays)

Responsibilities

• Architectural leadership as the principal architect for scalable, high‑performance Java real‑time data solutions, ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and resilience for both real‑time and end‑of‑day risk processes.
• Drive strategic implementation and optimization of distributed stream processing frameworks (Apache Kafka, Apache Flink) and real‑time storage technologies (Apache Pinot) for ultra‑low‑latency analytics and complex event processing.
• Lead end‑to‑end design, development, and operation of real‑time streaming data pipelines, integrating with large‑scale object storage like S3 and analytics engines such as Trino.
• Champion technical excellence and mentorship, improving reliability, efficiency, and scalability; establish and enforce best practices for code quality, performance optimization, and system resilience through hands‑on leadership and thorough peer reviews; mentor senior and lead developers.
• Own significant contributions across the Agile software development lifecycle, from architectural vision and detailed design to implementation, deployment, monitoring, and ongoing support for critical real‑time data systems.
• Collaborate with business analysts, product managers, QA teams, and other engineering leads to deliver integrated, high‑impact technology solutions aligned with business goals and architectural standards.
• Stay current with industry trends in real‑time data processing, distributed systems, and cloud‑native architectures, evaluating and proposing beneficial technology adoptions.

Requirements

• 7+ years of progressive experience in data engineering and software development with a focus on high‑performance, large‑scale distributed systems.
• Expert level Java (11+) with deep knowledge of concurrency, multithreading, advanced OOP concepts, design patterns, and performance tuning.
• Hands‑on production experience and deep architectural understanding of:
  • Apache Kafka for high throughput messaging
  • Apache Flink for real‑time stream processing
  • Apache Pinot for ultra‑low‑latency OLAP on streaming data
• Distributed systems architecture expertise focused on availability, scalability, and resilience
• Experience with large‑scale storage solutions (S3, HDFS) and distributed query engines (Trino/Presto, Spark SQL)
• Advanced SQL skills with a track record of optimizing complex queries over large datasets
• Proven Agile leadership experience guiding technical initiatives and teams
• Strong communication, analytical, and problem‑solving abilities to convey complex concepts and drive architectural consensus

Technologies

• Java
• Apache Kafka
• Apache Flink
• Apache Pinot
• S3
• Trino
• HDFS
• Spark SQL
• Kubernetes
• OpenShift
• AWS, Azure, GCP
• Presto