Senior Lead (Low Latency Trading Application) - Senior Vice President

Role Overview

We are seeking an accomplished and highly experienced Senior Vice President (SVP), Technical Lead, to drive critical strategic initiatives within our eTrading function in Canada. This pivotal role demands a visionary leader with a deep technical background, proven leadership capabilities, and a track record of delivering complex, high‑impact solutions in a fast‑paced financial services environment. The SVP will be responsible for defining and executing technical strategy, leading a team of senior developers, and providing significant site‑level leadership across the broader eTrading organization.

About Citi

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.
Our core activities are safeguarding assets, lending money, making payments and accessing the capital markets on behalf of our clients.
Diversity is a key business imperative and a source of strength at Citi. Being the best for our clients requires a culture of inclusion; an environment of equity, respect, and opportunity for everyone. Teams with varied backgrounds and experiences bring different perspectives to the conversation, enhance decision‑making, and improve overall business performance. Citi has made it a priority to foster a culture where the best people want to work, where individuals are promoted based on merit, where we value and demand respect for others and where opportunities to develop are widely available to all.

Rates eTrading Tech Overview

The evolution of electronic trading and automation has changed the way that rates products trade forever; driving a need for real‑time, low latency pricing, market making and risk technology. In this increasingly electronic and competitive landscape, Citi is a key player due to its leading eTrading platform and investment in technology. The Rates eTrading team is at the forefront, by building high-performance low latency technology that supports the execution of billions of dollars of client trades every day. Our competitive advantage is our technology and having a platform that provides exceptional and dependable trading experience. If you have this kind of vision, capable of seeing ahead, of developing a clear path forward in a quest to try the as yet untried, here is the opportunity.

Key Responsibilities

Senior Technical Leadership & Engineering

• Strategic Vision: Define and articulate the technical vision and strategy for Fixed Income Reference Data strategic systems and the Solace‑based middleware/messaging platform, aligning with overall eTrading and firm‑wide objectives.
• Architectural Guidance: Provide expert architectural direction and oversight for the design, development, and implementation of robust, scalable, and high‑performance systems, with a particular focus on the Solace event backbone and related Java components across the department.
• Technical Excellence: Champion engineering best practices, coding standards, and rigorous testing methodologies to ensure the delivery of high‑quality, resilient, and maintainable software solutions. This includes understanding and driving complex design principles, ensuring strong reliability, scalability, and performance of strategic components.
• Innovation & Research: Stay abreast of emerging technologies, industry trends, and architectural patterns (event‑driven architectures, microservices) to continually enhance our technical capabilities and competitive advantage. Evaluate and lead POCs for new strategic initiatives, driving their conversion into industrial‑level solutions.
• Problem Solving: Act as a critical technical escalation point, driving resolution for complex technical challenges and system performance issues. Apply an engineering mindset to development work, understanding use‑cases in detail, developing metrics to estimate volume and velocity requirements, and openly discussing implementation limitations or workarounds.
• System Design Leadership: Actively lead and contribute to significant system design decisions.

Team Leadership & Development

• Team Management: Directly lead and mentor a team of approximately 10 highly skilled developers, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Talent Development: Identify and nurture talent within the team, providing coaching, performance feedback, and opportunities for professional growth and skill enhancement.
• Resource Allocation: Manage team resources effectively, ensuring optimal allocation to strategic projects and operational support.
• Performance Management: Set clear performance objectives, conduct regular reviews, and drive accountability for results across the team.
• Recruitment & Onboarding: Actively participate in the recruitment of top‑tier engineering talent, contributing to the growth and development of the eTrading team.

Site‑Level Senior Leadership (eTrading Canada)

• Cross‑Functional Collaboration: Collaborate effectively with peer leaders across various eTrading functions in Canada, contributing to strategic planning, initiative prioritization, and operational excellence.
• Influence & Advocacy: Represent the technical interests and capabilities of the Fixed Income and Messaging platforms within broader site‑level discussions and decision‑making forums.
• Cultural Leadership: Contribute to shaping a positive and high‑performance culture across the eTrading Canada site, promoting transparency, accountability, and a client‑centric mindset.
• Stakeholder Management: Build strong relationships with key stakeholders, including business leaders, product managers, operations, and other technology teams, ensuring alignment and effective communication. This includes providing strategic post‑release assistance to business, development, and support groups.

Strategic Initiatives

• Fixed Income Reference Data Strategic Systems:
  1. Lead the architectural evolution, design, and implementation of next‑generation reference data platforms crucial for Fixed Income trading.
  2. Ensure data accuracy, consistency, and timely delivery across various trading systems and downstream consumers.
  3. Drive efforts to rationalize, consolidate, and modernize existing reference data infrastructure.
• Solace‑based Middleware/Messaging Platform:
  1. Spearhead the design, development, and ongoing enhancement of the enterprise‑wide Solace‑based event backbone.
  2. Oversee the development of platform capabilities that enable seamless event‑driven communication across thousands of Java components within the department.
  3. Ensure the messaging platform meets stringent requirements for low‑latency, high‑throughput, reliability, and security.

Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

Experience

• 10+ years of extensive experience in software development, architecture, and technical leadership roles within the financial services industry, preferably in eTrading.
• Proven track record of leading and successfully delivering complex, strategic technical initiatives.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience managing and mentoring technical teams (5+ individuals).
• Deep understanding of capital markets and financial derivatives (rates or other).
• Demonstrated experience with Fixed Income products and reference data systems is highly desirable.

Technical Skills

• Expert‑level proficiency in Java and related ecosystem technologies (Spring or other dependency injection frameworks).
• Extensive experience (10+ years) in developing and maintaining highly scalable, real‑time, low latency, high‑volume microservices.
• Deep expertise in real‑time messaging middleware, specifically Solace, along with other platforms like Kafka, RabbitMQ, Tibco.
• Profound experience working with multi‑threaded applications and designing high‑performance concurrent systems.
• Strong software development fundamentals, data structures, design patterns, Object‑Oriented programming, architecture, algorithms, and problem‑solving skills.
• Experience with system performance tuning and low latency Java programming.
• Proficiency with application deployment and debugging on UNIX/LINUX.
• Hands‑on experience in database technologies, including RDBMS (Oracle, etc.) and NoSQL (MongoDB).
• Experience with In‑Memory Datastore/Cache libraries (Sol cache, Redis, Apache Ignite, Gemfire, etc.).
• Extensive experience with CI/CD pipelines, test‑driven development (TDD), Unit and End‑to‑End Testing.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Exceptional leadership, communication (strong verbal and written), and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and inspire diverse teams and face off with business users.
• Self‑motivated individual with strong determination to achieve goals.
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills.
• Excellent team‑working skills and ability to work effectively in a distributed global team environment.
• Ability to work in a fast‑paced environment; flexible and able to deliver quality results in the required timeframe.
• Strong strategic thinking and problem‑solving abilities.
• Ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Proven ability to drive change and innovation in a large enterprise environment.
• High degree of professionalism, integrity, and personal accountability.

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

Citi is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified candidates will receive consideration without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.
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