Central Operations Enterprise Systems Architect - New York, Hybrid

Overview of Citi:

Citi is a world-leading global bank. We have approximately 200 million customer accounts and a presence in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions worldwide. We provide 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. We enable clients to achieve their strategic financial objectives by providing them with cutting-edge ideas, best-in-class products and solutions, and unparalleled access to capital and liquidity.

Overview of the organization:

The Chief Technology Office (CTO) is responsible for defining and executing the core architecture and technology strategy across the enterprise by working in partnership with business units and functions. Ensuring strategic alignment and efficiency of solutions across a diverse portfolio of engineering and transformation efforts. The Operations Enterprise Architecture capability sits within CTO organization and is responsible for driving process transformation, risk reduction, and efficiencies through best-in-class technology solutions. Including, development of shared services, comprehensive data architecture, automation, end-to-end solution design for large scale transformation initiatives, and adoption of Generative AI solutions.

Job Purpose:  

The Central Operations Enterprise Systems Architect will be a key leader in the technology organization, responsible for designing and developing the overall architecture vision and strategy for cross-business operations initiatives such as –payments control services, global reconciliations, reg. reporting, liquidity management, and strategic general ledger. We are seeking a visionary leader to standardize, simplify, and scale current fragmented application landscape to deliver business value and drive efficiencies. The role requires deep experience in designing, executing, and managing complex systems at scale, a passion for architectural simplification, and a demonstrable commitment for building sustainable, future-ready platforms. Successful candidate will partner with SMEs across business, Operations, Finance, and Technology functions and transformation leads to develop architecture blueprints, systems design, integration, and multi-year execution roadmap. The role reports directly into the Head of Operations Enterprise Architecture.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and maintain cohesive front-to-back system architecture across Central Operations to reduce fragmentation, support shared services, automate controls, and reduce manual touch points
• Engage with Ops business and technology partners to understand business drivers, gaps, and pain points in current state
• Translate into system requirement. Lead the design of scalable, resilient, and secure systems that reduce complexity and support operational efficiency across business units
• Develop systems architecture blueprints covering current and target state system flows, control definitions, STP vs. manual processing, and data contracts
• Partner with business and technology stakeholders to define and enforce architecture principles, standards, and roadmaps
• Drive simplification initiatives across application and infrastructure landscape, eliminating redundancies and technical debt
• Decompose functionality across legacy, monolithic applications to be reengineered into shared services
• Ensure architectural consistency across projects, platforms, and technologies by promoting reuse of shared components and standardized frameworks
• Define and promote best practices for systems design, API strategies, data integration, and lifecycle management
• Identify optimal technical and data solutions for developing event based micro-services
• Evaluate low-code / no-code tools to support workflow automation, process mining, reporting and analytics
• Lead architecture governance process including architecture review boards, technology assessments, and conformance to key design principles
• Partner with SMEs across the CTO organization to understand emerging engineering, architecture standards and apply them across critical initiatives
• Produce high-quality documentation and design artefacts
• Efficiently build strong working relationship with Tech and Ops partners and become a thought leader in executing the target data strategy
• Recruit and build a team of business analysts, solution engineers

Experience and Qualifications:

• 15+ years experience in financial services with 7+ years supporting cross product / functional transformation
• 5+ years experience in leading