AI Lead Engineer, Vice President

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.

As a bank with a brain and a soul, Citi creates economic value that is systemically responsible and in our clients’ best interests. As a financial institution that touches every region of the world and every sector that shapes your daily life, our Enterprise Operations & Technology teams are charged with a mission that rivals any large tech company. Our technology solutions are the foundations of everything we do from keeping the bank safe, managing global resources, and providing the technical tools our workers need to be successful to designing our digital architecture and ensuring our platforms provide a first-class customer experience. We reimagine client and partner experiences to deliver excellence through secure, reliable, and efficient services.

Our commitment to diversity includes a workforce that represents the clients we serve from all walks of life, backgrounds, and origins. We foster an environment where the best people want to work. We value and demand respect for others, promote individuals based on merit, and ensure opportunities for personal development are widely available to all. Ideal candidates are innovators with well-rounded backgrounds who bring their authentic selves to work and complement our culture of delivering results with pride. If you are a problem solver who seeks passion in your work, come join us. We’ll enable growth and progress together.

Position Overview:

We are seeking a highly motivated AI Lead Engineer to design, develop, and deploy AI-powered applications and agentic solutions that enhance business processes and client delivery capabilities. This role is primarily hands-on and requires strong software engineering, data engineering, and AI/ML expertise with a focus on building scalable enterprise solutions.

The successful candidate will work closely with architects, product owners, data scientists, and engineering teams to implement AI-driven capabilities including LLMs, Agentic AI workflows, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and intelligent automation solutions within a regulated financial services environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Agent Design and Development: Design and implement intelligent agents, including their perception, reasoning, planning, and action execution modules.

• Data Engineering & Integration: Design and develop data pipelines supporting AI and machine learning workloads. Ensure data quality, lineage, governance, and security requirements are met.

• Machine Learning Integration: Integrate various machine learning models (e.g., LLMs, reinforcement learning, predictive models) to enhance agent capabilities and decision-making.

• Software Engineering: Develop production-grade applications and APIs using Python and/or Java. Build reusable services, microservices, and AI components.

• Framework and Tooling: Utilize and contribute to agentic AI frameworks and development tools.

• Research and Innovation: Stay abreast of the latest advancements in AI, particularly in agent-based systems, autonomous AI, and related fields, and propose innovative solutions.

• Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams including AI researchers, data scientists, product managers, and software engineers to integrate agentic solutions into broader products and services.

• Documentation: Create comprehensive technical documentation for agent designs, implementations, and operational procedures.

• Leadership: Manage several AI use cases within the portfolio along with overseeing a team of AI engineers as part of a AI Centre of Excellence (COE) team.

Required Qualifications:

• Education: Bachelor’s Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, or a related quantitative field. Master's degree is a plus

• Experience: 6+ years of professional experience in software development. 2+ years working with AI/ML, Generative AI, or intelligent automation solutions. Financial services experience preferred.

• Programming: Strong proficiency in Python, SQL;  Java is a plus.

• AI/ML Expertise:

• • Experience working with Generative AI and LLM-based applications.

• • Knowledge of Prompt Engineering, RAG, embeddings, vector DBs, and agentic frameworks.

• • Familiarity with LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or similar frameworks.

• • Experience utilizing OpenAI, Azure, Anthropic, Gemini, Bedrock, or equivalent platforms.

• • Understanding of machine learning fundamentals and model evaluation technique.

• Data Engineering: Experience designing and supporting data pipelines and data integration workflows.

• Problem-Solving: Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with a creative approach to complex challenges.

• Communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.

• Platforms: Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Domain – Finance preferable

• Collaboration – Able to collaborate within and across teams and organizations
• Education: Bachelor’s Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, or a related quantitative field. Master's degree is a plus

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

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In addition to salary, Citi’s offerings may also include, for eligible employees, discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards. Citi offers competitive employee benefits, including: medical, dental & vision coverage; 401(k); life, accident, and disability insurance; and wellness programs. Citi also offers paid time off packages, including planned time off (vacation), unplanned time off (sick leave), and paid holidays. For additional information regarding Citi employee benefits, please visit citibenefits.com. Available offerings may vary by jurisdiction, job level, and date of hire.

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We use automated processing, including artificial intelligence, for our legitimate business interests (or our reasonable and appropriate business purposes) to identify and align the candidate's skills and abilities with a specific job opening. Additionally, if you so choose, or consent, we can match your skills and abilities to other suitable roles at Citi.

Importantly, all our hiring processes and decisions, including determining your suitability for a role, are conducted, checked, and decided by individuals. Our automated processing and AI do not involve relying on automatic or autonomous decision-making. Please refer to any Jurisdictional Considerations, with specific provisions for your country (where relevant) for further details.

Illinois residents – AI Notice and Right

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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.