AI Engineer – Startups & Partnerships

About Citi:

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 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.

The Team:

The Startups & Partnerships team is the forward scout of the Citi's Head of AI Organization. Our mandate: identify, evaluate, and rapidly onboard the emerging technologies that will define Citi's next chapter with Artificial Intelligence as our number one strategic priority right now. We don't sit in a lab waiting for ideas to trickle in. We move across every line of business at Citi, sit down directly with business stakeholders and clients, and go toe-to-toe with the sharpest startups and frontier AI labs in the market. We run fast, we run lean, and we run with the full weight of a global institution behind us.

The Opportunity:

As an AI Engineer on the Startups & Partnerships team, you will be at the tip of the spear for Citi's AI strategy - building, testing, and shipping real applications that touch real business problems across the bank, not writing whitepapers about them from the sidelines.

You'll get a level of exposure that's rare in a Tier-1 global bank: direct access to business requirements, hands-on evaluation of the newest models and platforms from the industry's leading AI labs, and the mandate to move at startup speed inside an institution operating at global scale. If you want to build things that matter, get them in front of real users fast, and shape how one of the world's largest financial institutions adopts AI - this is the seat.

What You'll Do Day to Day

• Build and ship AI applications - architect, develop, and deploy production-grade AI-powered tools, pipelines, and workflows that solve real business problems across Citi's lines of business.

• Evaluate emerging AI technology - run structured proof-of-concepts and sandbox "bake-offs" to rapidly assess new models, platforms, and startup tools (LLMs, agentic frameworks, orchestration layers) for real-world fit.

• Prototype at speed - turn a business idea into a working demo in days, not quarters, and iterate quickly based on stakeholder feedback.

• Integrate across the stack - connect LLMs and agentic systems to enterprise APIs, data pipelines, and lightweight front-end or tooling layers to deliver end-to-end working solutions.

• Deliver PoCs into production pathways - work with governance, risk, and platform teams to shepherd validated solutions from prototype toward scaled deployment.

• Communicate impact - translate technical work into clear, compelling narratives for senior business and technology stakeholders.

Required Skills

• A full-stack engineer with applied AI/LLM experience - this is explicitly not a data science or ML research role. We need builders, not modelers.

• Proven experience building and shipping AI applications, pipelines, and workflows in live, production environments - not just notebooks and academic experiments.

• Hands-on proficiency with Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, and agentic frameworks and orchestration tools (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or similar).

• Strong software engineering fundamentals - comfortable working across the stack, from backend services and API integrations to lightweight front-end or internal tooling layers.

• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills - you can work directly with business leaders and clients, not just other engineers.

• A track record of learning and adopting new tools and platforms quickly as the AI landscape evolves.

• Comfort operating in a large, regulated, global institution while bringing a startup-speed mentality to your work.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience working directly with startups, venture teams, or technology scouting functions.

• Familiarity with vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or knowledge graph-based retrieval.

• Experience with containerization and cloud-native deployment (Docker, Kubernetes) for AI services.

• Prior exposure to financial services, banking, or other highly regulated industries.

• Experience presenting technical concepts to non-technical, senior business audiences.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree/University degree or equivalent experience
• Master’s degree preferred

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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Automated Processing and AI

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.