We’re looking for a talented Server-Side Tech Lead to help build our next-generation Developer Experience (DevEx) platform at Citi using Kotlin. You’ll be joining a small, high-impact team, shaping the daily lives of our 50,000 engineers globally by building the platform where engineers can see all parts of the software development life cycle, such as code reviews, JIRAS and deployments, all tied together into a workflow in near real-time. This is an exciting technical challenge for an ambitious candidate.

Where you’ll work

You’ll sit within Development Enablement, part of Citi’s CTO organisation. 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 save our engineers tens of minutes per day, equating to £10,000,000s of savings at Citi’s scale.

What you’ll do in your first year

By day 45

• Have worked with an external team to connect with an upstream system and shipped to production

• You’ll have a fully documented OpenAPI contract agreed between client and server

• Created a performant API endpoint, with the time to first byte within 200ms.

By 3 months – Create system architecture and establish key relationships

• Established some working relationships with engineering teams across Citi.

• Begun designing a systems architecture that takes into consideration our future near real-time requirements and the ability to link that data together into a workflow, such as being able to connect a JIRA ticket to a deployment in production

• Aligned the team on architectural principles, ways of working and system requirements. For example: you might choose dependency inversion for the code structure; opting for Availability and Partition tolerance over Consistency data; we also may decide that we want data to appear on the UI less than 1 second after it was received.

By 6 months - Architecture patterns established, integrated with several services

• You will have integrated with several upstream APIs – for example, a service that consolidates CI/CD status across multiple pipelines, or an aggregation service for production error metrics.

• Using your architectural principles and requirements, you’ll have solved hard engineering problems, making the pros and cons visible and gaining consensus from the team.

• You will have bought additional technologies online (e.g., Kafka, Postgres, etc.) as needed to realize the architectural vision, meeting the requirements agreed upon by month 3.

• You will have received majority positive feedback from your colleagues on your technical leadership.

By 12 months – Own and run the backend infrastructure

• You’ll own the server-side code and infrastructure data pipelines that support complete workflows, such as tracing a JIRA ticket's progression through build, test, and deployment into production.

• You will have taken full technical ownership of the backend platform with the team's approval and had a meaningful impact on the speed and scalability of the platform.

• The application will be capable of supporting 10,000 - 20,000 users per day in near real-time.
  

What you will bring

• Strong server-side engineering skills: Kotlin, building and consuming RESTful APIs, asynchronous programming.

• Proficiency with relational and/or NoSQL databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB.

• Experience with message queuing systems: Apache Kafka.

• Deep understanding of containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).

• Familiarity with CI/CD tools like Tekton and deployment automation platforms like Harness.

• Comfortable collaborating with product, design, and UI engineers, and other stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver robust backend solutions.
  

Tools and technologies you might use

• Kotlin/Java, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Apache Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Tekton, Harness

• Mac or PC – it’s up to you

• Access to time-saving AI tools such as GitHub Copilot and Cognition.ai’s Devin

Why you’ll love working here:

• You’ll shape the daily experience of tens of thousands of engineers at one of the largest engineering organizations in the world by building the resilient systems they rely on.

• You’ll work in a small autonomous team, with impact across our global organization.

• You’ll get to use your strong backend engineering skills on hard problems to build a shape a greenfield platform