Building the AI Engineering Organization

• Build, structure, and lead a high-performing AI engineering function aligned to COO's operational priorities — including team topology, operating model, and career pathways
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, intellectual curiosity, and pragmatic innovation: engineers who ship production solutions, not prototypes
• Own and manage the AI technology portfolio budget (~$200M), driving disciplined funding allocation, financial transparency, and cost-to-serve accountability
• Lead productivity and efficiency programs with measurable targets across cycle time, quality, throughput, and engineering leverage
• Define and optimize vendor and partner strategy, including strategic AI platform partnerships (e.g., Google, Anthropic), third-party tooling, and outsourced delivery models

Qualifications:

Required:

• 15+ years of experience in Technology
  • Generative AI & LLM Engineering: Deep, hands-on expertise in large language models including model selection, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector database design, and evaluation methodologies. You understand how models behave in production, not just in demos.
  • Agentic Systems Design: Proven experience designing and deploying multi-agent architectures and orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI); tool-use patterns, human-in-the-loop workflows, and agentic safety at enterprise scale
  • AI/ML Engineering & MLOps: Full AI/ML lifecycle ownership: training pipelines, model deployment, versioning, monitoring, drift detection, observability (e.g., Weights & Biases, Arize), and lifecycle management using platforms such as MLflow, Vertex AI, or SageMaker
  • Cloud AI Platforms: Demonstrated deployment of AI workloads on AWS, GCP, and/or Azure including managed ML services, scalable inference infrastructure, and vector stores
  • Programming & Frameworks: Strong Python proficiency; working knowledge of PyTorch or TensorFlow; applied experience with AI application frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalents)
  • Enterprise AI Architecture: Designing AI systems for regulated production environments: data security, model explainability, audit logging, access controls, and integration with legacy systems
• Leadership & Delivery
  • 15+ years in technology, with a proven record of leading large-scale engineering organizations through build-out and transformation
  • 10+ years of management experience, including direct leadership of senior engineers and architects, and management of managers across global teams
  • Demonstrated delivery of enterprise AI solutions with realized measurable business outcomes — not just successful pilots or proofs of concept
  • Experience managing large, complex technology budgets ($50M+) with accountability for financial transparency and ROI
  • Track record of operating effectively in matrixed, cross-functional organizations at the intersection of technology and operations

Strongly Preferred

• Deep familiarity with financial services operations and the regulatory landscape — particularly KYC/AML, fraud, reconciliations, and regulatory reporting
• Strong understanding of model risk management (MRM) and what it takes to move AI from development to production under regulatory scrutiny
• Experience engaging with strategic technology partners (cloud providers, AI platform companies) at an executive level

Leadership Profile

• You build platforms, not point solutions — you instinctively seek the reusable, the shared, the scalable
• You are equally credible in a deep technical architecture review and a board-level strategy discussion
• You attract, develop, and retain strong technical talent — engineers want to work for you because they grow
• You operate with clarity and urgency in ambiguous environments; complexity energizes rather than paralyzes you
• You communicate with precision — you can make a complex AI architecture concept land with a CRO, a COO, and a principal engineer, and you do it differently for each

Education:

• Bachelors required; Master's in CS, AI/ML, or related field preferred

What success looks like:

In the first year, we expect the successful candidate to:

• Establish the AI engineering team and operating model — hire and structure a high-performing team with clear roles, responsibilities, and a strong culture
• Deliver 3+ production-grade agentic AI systems across priority COO domains, with measurable operational impact (cost, speed, quality, or risk reduction)
• Launch the shared AI platform — reusable RAG infrastructure, evaluation frameworks, and common tooling adopted across COO Technology
• Define and align the multi-year AI roadmap with COO function leads and the Head of COO Technology, with clear prioritization, milestones, and funding allocation
• Establish AI governance — Architecture Review Boards, model risk processes, and compliance frameworks embedded in the delivery lifecycle

Why this role

• Scale that is rare. You will build AI capabilities across one of the world's most operationally complex banking platforms — with direct, measurable impact on how trillions of dollars in transactions are processed, controlled, and reported daily.
• Greenfield mandate. The team, the platform, and the strategy are yours to define. You will set the architectural direction, the engineering culture, and the standards that govern AI across the COO portfolio.
• Uniquely hard problems. Banking operations at this scale generate AI challenges that simply do not exist elsewhere — legacy system integration, regulatory auditability requirements, multi-jurisdictional data constraints, and the need for explainability in consequential decisions. If you want to solve problems that matter and that are genuinely difficult, this is the role.
• Executive visibility and sponsorship. This role has CIO and COO-level visibility, a clear organizational mandate, and the budget to execute without delay.
• Strategic partnerships. Collaborate directly with Google, Anthropic, and leading cloud AI providers to design and deploy core platform capabilities at scale.

Citi is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.

Qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.

Job Family Group:

Technology