Head of Personal Loans Core Platforms and Lending Integrations - Director

Job description

Brief Description of the Organization Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Our mission is to serve as a trusted partner to our clients by responsibly providing financial services that enable growth and economic progress. We strive to earn and maintain our clients’ and the public’s trust by constantly adhering to the highest ethical standards and making a positive impact on the communities we serve. Citi’s Personal Banking and Wealth Management (PBWM) division is building a purpose-driven team to serve its globally diverse, digitally forward customers in top cities around the world. We’re looking for exceptional candidates who think digitally and differently, resolve problems in unconventional ways and strive to provide a remarkable experience for our clients. We define success by our Citi Leadership Principles: We Take Ownership, We Deliver with Pride and We Succeed Together. Overview of the Role The Head of USCC Personal Loans Core Platforms and Lending Integrations is accountable for the execution and delivery of next-generation API integration platforms across value proposition, lending, and commerce ecosystems. This role owns a critical engineering function responsible for building scalable, secure, and compliant integration platforms that support Value Cards, Lending and Commerce business in USCC. The individual applies deep technical expertise and strong business understanding to translate strategic priorities into enterprise-grade API integration solutions. This is a highly technical leadership role, requiring the individual to actively drive architecture, influence low-level design, and guide implementation through principal and senior engineers. The role is expected to set engineering standards, define technical guardrails, and contribute hands-on where required, including the ability to review, prototype, and write production-grade code to unblock teams or validate approaches. Operating within a highly regulated environment, this role is responsible for end-to-end platform delivery, operational stability, and risk alignment, while managing multiple teams and influencing outcomes across a matrixed organization. The position requires balancing innovation in API-driven integrations with strong governance, control frameworks, and production reliability. The role has direct accountability for engineering delivery, people leadership and financial management while influencing cross-functional stakeholders across product, risk and external partners. It plays a key role in advancing Citi's value cards, Lending and Commerce capabilities through modern engineering practices, platform reuse, and scalable ecosystem integration. Typically, a direct report to a C16/MD role and functions as an integral member of the functional leadership team within a country/site location, job family, or line of business. Key Responsibilities Platform Delivery & Engineering Excellence Own delivery and ongoing evolution of Personal Loans Core and Lending API integration for Lending domain, ensuring systems are scalable, resilient, and aligned with business priorities. Drive execution across multiple teams and manage interdependencies to deliver consistent, high-quality outcomes. Provide direction on target-state architecture and engineering standards, including API-first and event-driven design, microservices architecture, and secure integration patterns. Actively engage in design reviews, challenge assumptions, and guide principal engineers in solving complex technical problems. Lead the design, implementation, and successful delivery of large-scale or significantly difficult software solutions that have a long-term impact on products, technology, or architecture across value, lending, and commerce platforms. Technical Leadership & Innovation Design approaches and personally contribute code that is noteworthy in some way (e.g., a significant refactor that simplifies or improves architectural quality, enables competitive advantage, offers significant extensibility, performance, scalability, or has organization-wide operational excellence impact). Identify and tackle intrinsically hard problems (e.g., highly complex, ambiguous, undefined, with less existing structure, or having significant business or security risk or potential for significant impact). Deliver artifacts that set the standard within your organization for engineering excellence, from designs to algorithms to implementations. Your personal code submissions and reviews of other people's code are instructive and make the overall code corpus better. Lead and actively participate in design reviews, aligning teams across your organization towards coherent architectural strategies. You bring clarity to complexity, probe assumptions, illuminate pitfalls, and foster shared understanding. Domain-Specific Responsibilities Oversee development of API integration workflows for value proposition services, lending capabilities, and commerce platforms, including authentication, authorization, transaction orchestration, and third-party integrations. Ensure solutions are built with appropriate controls, auditability, and alignment to regulatory and risk requirements. Lead engineering efforts supporting seamless integration with internal and external systems, including partner APIs, data platforms, and core banking systems. Drive development of real-time integration capabilities and data-driven solutions to enhance customer and business outcomes. Keep abreast of industry trends. You effectively research and benchmark our technology against other competing software in the industry. You understand that many problems are not essentially new. Risk, Compliance & Operational Excellence Ensure adherence to Citi's risk and control framework, including data privacy, regulatory compliance, and secure development practices. Maintain accountability for platform integrity, t