Application Support Lead Analyst - Vice President

The SRE Lead – Emerging Payments is accountable for driving the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) transformation and reliability outcomes across the Emerging Payments Production Services portfolio, part of the wider Payments Services organization. You will lead and direct a virtual team of engineers globally, acting as a key technical delegate and reliability partner to the Global Head of Emerging Payments and part of the Management Team. This role requires a comprehensive end-to-end understanding of instant and high-throughput payments processing across both legacy and modernized architectures. You will apply an in-depth understanding of the business impact of technical contributions, leading cultural and engineering shifts from traditional application support to proactive, engineered reliability. As a technical leader, you will be instrumental in implementing advanced observability, chaos engineering, resiliency, self-healing, and end-to-end automation solutions. You will partner closely with Production, architecture, infrastructure, and application development teams across Citi to eliminate operational toil, drive down Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), and ensure the highest levels of stability, scalability, and performance for our global payments platform. Responsibilities: * SRE Transformation & Regional Leadership: Deliver best-in-class Site Reliability Engineering and production services function for Citi's Emerging Payments portfolio. Establish standard reliability engineering practices across all legacy, hybrid, and cloud-native application stacks. * Observability & Telemetry Engineering: Provide hands-on technical leadership in designing and deploying unified, full-stack observability frameworks. Implement advanced distributed tracing, metrics aggregation, log analytics, anomaly detection, and synthetic monitoring to enable proactive detection and rapid triage of systemic payment issues. * Resiliency, Auto-Healing & Chaos Engineering: Support the implementation of robust resiliency, self-healing, and disaster recovery (DR) solutions. Champion chaos engineering principles, active-active multi-region failover strategies, and automated recovery mechanisms to safeguard critical payment rails against disruption. * Toil Reduction & Automation: Systematically identify, measure, and eliminate operational toil across legacy and modernized applications. Automate runbooks to optimize operational efficiency and minimize manual interventions. * Production Readiness & Architectural Governance: Collaborate strategically with enterprise and solutions architecture teams to embed reliability, observability, and supportability standards into early development phases. Working alongside our Transition Lead enforce rigorous Production Readiness and non-functional requirements (NFRs) for onboarding and migrating applications. * Operational Efficiency & Continuous Improvement: Drive operational excellence across the portfolio through systematic root cause analysis, capacity planning, performance tuning, and technical debt remediation. * Stakeholder Engagement: Partner with global business leads, product managers, and engineering leads to translate technical reliability metrics into business value. Transparently communicate system health, operational risks, and modernization progress to senior leadership. * Risk & Compliance: Appropriately assess risk when business decisions are made, demonstrating particular consideration for the firm's reputation and safeguarding Citi, its clients, and assets. Drive compliance and adhere to policy, and escalate control issues with full transparency. Qualifications: * 10+ YOE is a must have. * Relevant extensive experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, or Production Engineering, with proven experience in instant payments, real-time transaction processing, or mission-critical financial systems. * Demonstrated track record of leading SRE/production transformations across complex portfolios comprising both monolithic/legacy systems and modernized microservices/cloud architectures. * Deep hands-on expertise in observability platforms (e.g., ITRS, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, AppDynamics) and distributed tracing across hybrid environments. * Strong proficiency in automation and scripting languages (e.g., Python, Go, Shell/Bash) and Infrastructure as Code / Configuration Management tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible). * Solid architectural understanding of containerization and orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes, OpenShift), messaging/event-driven systems (e.g., Kafka, MQ), and database technologies. * Exceptional leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence cross-functional engineering and executive stakeholders. * Strong crisis management skills with proven capability to lead triage and recovery during high-severity production incidents under pressure. * Proven experience in building, mentoring, and scaling high-performing technical teams in a global delivery model. Education: * Bachelor’s/University degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or related technical discipline; Master’s degree preferred. \------------------------------------------------------ ## Job Family Group: Technology \------------------------------------------------------ ## Job Family: Applications Support \------------------------------------------------------ ## Time Type: Full time \------------------------------------------------------ ## Most Relevant Skills Please see the requirements listed above. \------------------------------------------------------ ## Other Relevant Skills For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter. \------------------------------------------------------ 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. If you are a person with a disability and need a reasonable accommodation to use our search tools and/or apply for a career opportunity review Accessibility at Citi. View Citi’s EEO Policy Statement and the Know Your Rights poster.