AI Engineer – Startups & Partnerships

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.

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.

• 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-concept 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.

• 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., Lang Chain, Llama Index, Auto Gen, 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.
• Experience working directly with startups, venture teams, or technology scouting functions. (Desirable)
• Familiarity with vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or knowledge graph-based retrieval. (Desirable)
• Experience with containerization and cloud-native deployment (Docker, Kubernetes) for AI…