DISTINGUISHED ENGINEER, AGENTIC IDENTITY & NON HUMAN IDENTITY SECURITY
Position Summary
Your role as Distinguished Engineer is to work with engineering teams and architecture to produce high quality technology solutions that enable Citizens' next generation identity, security, and AI capabilities. You will be given the autonomy to lead, design, and develop innovative solutions addressing some of the most complex challenges facing the banking industry as organizations evolve from human centric identity models toward AI driven, machine driven, and autonomous systems.
As a Distinguished Engineer, you will serve as a peer leader and technical visionary responsible for defining and advancing the enterprise strategy for Agentic Identity, Non Human Identities (NHIs), machine identity governance, and secure AI enabled ecosystems. You will partner across engineering, architecture, security, and product organizations to establish secure identity frameworks that support APIs, workloads, AI agents, service accounts, and emerging autonomous technologies at enterprise scale.
The breadth of Citizens operations ensures a diverse set of opportunities to shape the future of identity, security, and AI as the bank continues its transformation toward innovation and customer centric experiences.
Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Engineering Excellence
• Collaborate with engineering teams and architects to design innovative identity and security solutions that align with enterprise architecture principles and strategic business goals.
• Lead the design, development, and implementation of modern software platforms, services, and security capabilities that support enterprise scale digital transformation initiatives.
• Serve as a technical leader and trusted advisor across multiple engineering organizations, influencing strategic technology decisions and architectural direction.
• Infuse scalability, reliability, resiliency, maintainability, and security into distributed systems and service based architectures.
• Promote engineering excellence, innovation, and accountability through mentoring, technical leadership, and thought partnership.
• Communicate complex technical concepts effectively to engineers, architects, executives, and business stakeholders.
Agentic Identity & Non Human Identity Architecture
• Design and champion enterprise architectures for Non Human Identities (NHIs), including AI agents, service accounts, workload identities, machine identities, APIs, autonomous systems, and cloud native workloads.
• Define and implement identity security frameworks for AI agents, including authentication, authorization, secrets management, token governance, lifecycle management, and policy enforcement.
• Lead the development of secure identity architectures supporting agentic systems across cloud, SaaS, hybrid, and on premises environments.
• Establish enterprise standards for machine identity governance, workload identity management, credential security, and privileged access controls.
• Design secure authentication and authorization models supporting autonomous interactions between AI agents, applications, APIs, cloud services, and enterprise platforms.
• Architect solutions that support continuous authentication and continuous authorization across highly distributed digital ecosystems.
• Develop scalable identity strategies for machine to machine communications, API interactions, workload identities, service meshes, and microservices architectures.
• Define governance frameworks that ensure accountability, visibility, auditability, and compliance for AI agents and machine identities operating across the enterprise.
• Partner with engineering and architecture teams to secure emerging identity patterns associated with AI agents, autonomous workflows, and non human actors.
Modern Identity & Access Management
• Design and implement identity solutions leveraging OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), token based security, API authorization frameworks, and modern identity standards.
• Establish secure identity patterns for cloud native applications, distributed systems, APIs, microservices, and SaaS platforms.
• Strengthen enterprise identity controls through least privilege access, workload identity governance, privileged access management, credential management, and authorization policy design.
• Drive innovation in identity security to address evolving risks associated with machine identities, AI systems, non human accounts, and autonomous technologies.
Risk Management & Security Strategy
• Identify, assess, and mitigate risks associated with credential compromise, excessive privileges, unmanaged machine identities, orphaned service accounts, and unauthorized agent activity.
• Collaborate with governance, risk, compliance, and security teams to align identity strategies with regulatory requirements and enterprise risk objectives.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, industry trends, and market developments related to identity, AI, machine identity governance, and autonomous systems.
• Influence long term enterprise strategy for identity security, agentic identity, and next generation access management capabilities.
Required Qualifications
• 10+ years of hands on software engineering, platform engineering, identity engineering, security engineering, or related technical experience.
• Deep expertise in Identity and Access Management (IAM), Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM), Non Human Identity (NHI), machine identity, workload identity, privileged access management, or related disciplines.
• Demonstrated expertise designing and implementing modern authentication and authorization architectures using OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), token based security models, and API security frameworks.
• Experience securing machine identities, service accounts, workload identities, cloud native platforms, APIs, and distributed application ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of modern cloud architectures and identity challenges across hybrid, SaaS, and cloud native environments.
• Experience developing software in Python and mastery of at least one additional modern programming language.
• AWS experience, including securing and managing sensitive assets and enterprise workloads.
• Bash and Linux experience.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines including Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent technologies.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, microservices, and cloud architecture patterns.
• Demonstrated ability to lead, mentor, and influence senior engineering teams.
• Proven ability to communicate highly technical concepts to executive and business audiences.
• Strong problem solving, analytical, and strategic thinking skills.
• Understanding of data structures and algorithms including linked lists, arrays, dictionaries, maps, and object oriented design principles.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience designing identity solutions for AI agents, autonomous systems, machine identities, and emerging agentic technologies.
• Experience within financial services, fintech, cloud, cybersecurity, or highly regulated industries.
• Experience leading enterprise scale identity modernization or transformation programs.
• AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or identity related certifications.
• Recognized thought leadership through publications, conference presentations, patents, open source contributions, or industry participation.
Education and Certifications
Required
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Security, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
Preferred
- Master's Degree in a related field.
- Industry certifications in cloud architecture, security, IAM, CIAM, or identity governance.
Why This Role Matters
This role will help define how Citizens securely enables AI agents, machine identities, APIs, cloud workloads, and emerging non human actors across the enterprise. The Distinguished Engineer will play a critical leadership role in shaping the future of Agentic Identity, ensuring secure, scalable, and governed interactions between people, applications, AI systems, and autonomous technologies.
Compensation
The salary range for this position is $175,000 to $250,000 per year, plus an opportunity to earn additional incentive earnings. Actual pay is based on various factors including, but not limited to, the budget, work location, and relevant skills and experience.
Benefits
Comprehensive benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, retirement plans, parental leave, flexible work arrangements, education reimbursement, wellness programs, and generous paid time off exceeding local requirements.
https://jobs.citizensbank.com/benefits.
Equal Employment Opportunity
Citizens, its parent, subsidiaries, and related companies (Citizens) provide equal employment and advancement opportunities to all colleagues and applicants for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, citizenship, physical or mental disability, perceived disability or history or record of a disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or expression, genetic information, genetic characteristic, marital or domestic partner status, victim of domestic violence, family status/parenthood, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, pregnancy/childbirth/lactation, colleague’s or a dependent’s reproductive health decision making, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or any other category protected by federal, state and/or local laws. At Citizens, we are committed to fostering an inclusive culture that enables all colleagues to bring their best selves to work every day and everyone is expected to be treated with respect and professionalism. Employment decisions are based solely on merit, qualifications, performance and capability.
Equal Employment and Opportunity Employer
Job Applicant Data Privacy Policy
Background Check
Any offer of employment is conditioned upon the candidate successfully passing a background check, which may include initial credit, motor vehicle record, public record, prior employment verification, and criminal background checks. Results of the background check are individually reviewed based upon legal requirements imposed by our regulators and with consideration of the nature and gravity of the background history and the job offered. Any offer of employment will include further information.
Skills Required
- 10+ years of hands-on experience in software engineering, platform engineering, identity engineering, security engineering, or a related technical field.
- Deep expertise in IAM, CIAM, non-human identity, machine identity, workload identity, privileged access management, or related disciplines.
- Expertise designing and implementing authentication and authorization architectures using OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, token-based security, and API security frameworks.
- Experience securing machine identities, service accounts, workload identities, cloud-native platforms, APIs, and distributed application ecosystems.
- Strong understanding of cloud architectures and identity challenges across hybrid, SaaS, and cloud-native environments.
- Software development experience in Python and mastery of at least one additional modern programming language.
- AWS experience securing and managing sensitive assets and enterprise workloads.
- Experience with Bash and Linux.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, including Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent technologies.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, microservices, and cloud architecture patterns.
- Ability to lead, mentor, and influence senior engineering teams.
- Ability to communicate highly technical concepts to executive and business audiences.
- Strong problem-solving, analytical, and strategic thinking skills.
- Understanding of data structures, algorithms, linked lists, arrays, dictionaries, maps, and object-oriented design principles.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, information security, computer engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Experience designing identity solutions for AI agents, autonomous systems, machine identities, and emerging agentic technologies.
- Experience in financial services, fintech, cloud, cybersecurity, or highly regulated industries.
- Experience leading enterprise-scale identity modernization or transformation programs.
- AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or identity-related certifications.
- Recognized thought leadership through publications, conference presentations, patents, open-source contributions, or industry participation.
- Master’s degree in a related field.
- Industry certifications in cloud architecture, security, IAM, CIAM, or identity governance.
Citizens Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Citizens and has not been reviewed or approved by Citizens.
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Parental & Family Support — Policies include six weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents, up to 16 weeks for birthing parents, 10 days of emergency back‑up care, and adoption assistance of more than $25,000. Recognition for adoption support underscores a strong family‑friendly posture.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off includes 11 paid holidays and up to 27 PTO days. The breadth of leave is presented as generous versus many peers.
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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision options pair with an HSA that includes a company contribution, plus mental‑health access via Spring Health (eight no‑cost sessions), Hinge Health, wellness programs, and discounted gyms. Eligibility at 20+ hours per week broadens access to these resources.
Citizens Insights
What We Do
As one of the oldest and largest financial services firms in the United States with a history dating back to 1828, we’re committed to providing solutions and expertise that support our customers, clients, colleagues, and communities in what’s next on their own unique journey. We invest in the humans who build the logic, ideas, and innovations that bring new technologies to life. Investments in AI, cloud computing, machine learning and automation provide our engineers the tools that enable us to remain competitive and win in today’s environment. At Citizens, we recognize that the journey to accomplishment is no longer linear and that individuals are made of all they have done and all they are going to do. Whether you’re considering banking with us or looking to work with us, you’ll find a customer-centric culture and a supportive, collaborative workforce at Citizens. You’re made ready and so are we. If you're ready to advance your career in technology and security, learn more about opportunity's Citizens offers here: https://jobs.citizensbank.com/digital-transformation
Why Work With Us
We empower the colleagues that power our tech. With growth & upskilling opportunities and sought-after benefits, plus a diverse culture of people and perspectives, we help our colleagues achieve career goals. Because innovation can’t happen without the minds and hearts of our people. Technology is constantly evolving, and we believe you can too.
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