Senior AI Application Development Lead, Senior Vice President

Citi is seeking aSenior AI Application Development Leadto spearhead the architecture and delivery of intelligent, distributed systems at the heart of one of the world's premier financial institutions. In this role, you will lead an innovative engineering team within

Citi Wealth Technology, driving strategic solutions across Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Distributed Computing for our global wealth and private banking client base.

This role is structured as 60% technical leadership, team mentorship, and architectural governance, and
40% hands-on systems design, prototyping, and core development. You will guide engineering squads, elevate development standards, and own end-to-end architecture across complex AI platforms — spanning modern LLM orchestration frameworks, cloud-native infrastructure, and scalable backend services.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Mentorship (60%)

• Engineering Direction & Governance:
  
  Provide technical direction and architectural oversight across multiple engineering squads within Wealth Technology, ensuring adherence to enterprise design principles, scalability standards, and engineering best practices.
• Team Mentoring & Talent Development:
  
  Coach and mentor mid-level to senior engineers, conducting high-impact code reviews, technical deep-dives, and career growth coaching.
• Modern AI Engineering Practices:
  
  Drive team adoption of modern developer productivity tools, including AI coding agents (such as Git Hub Copilot and Devin), establishing frameworks for accelerated software delivery.
• Stakeholder Alignment & Solution Strategy:
  
  Partner with business leaders, product managers, and cross-functional teams to translate strategic business requirements into robust, forward-looking technical roadmaps using Jira, Confluence, and Git Hub.
• Security & Quality Governance:
  
  Champion Dev Sec Ops  principles, embedding automated testing, code quality, and security scanning (via Checkmarx, Snyk, Black Duck) across all CI/CD pipelines.

Hands-On Architecture & Development (40%)

• AI & Intelligent Systems Design:
  
  Architect, prototype, and build production-grade AI/ML solutions using Python and Java, integrating LLM orchestration frameworks (Lang Chain, Llama Index) and leveraging Google Vertex AI agent services.
• Distributed & Event-Driven Systems:
  
  Architect high-throughput, fault-tolerant event streams and data pipelines utilizing Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and modern distributed streaming patterns.
• API & Backend Service Engineering:
  
  Design and implement resilient, low-latency microservices and API gateways using FastAPI, Flask, or Spring Boot, backed by PostgreSQL and Redis.
• Cloud & Container
  
  Infrastructure:
  
  Deploy and manage resilient containerized applications on Kubernetes and Red Hat Open Shift, utilizing Helm charts, CI/CD automation (Jenkins, Tekton, Harness), and observability suites (Prometheus, Grafana, App Dynamics, Splunk).
• Embed security and code quality practices across the engineering lifecycle using tools such as Checkmarx, Snyk, and Black Duck, ensuring all solutions meet enterprise security and compliance standards.

Required Qualifications & Skills

• 12+ years of progressive software engineering and architecture experience, with a proven track record of technical leadership and team mentorship.
• Leadership & Architecture:
  Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams, driving architectural decisions, conducting technical design reviews, and fostering engineering excellence.
• Core
  
  Languages:
  
  Deep hands-on proficiency in Python and/or Java, with strong database design and querying skills in SQL.
• Production AI & LLM Systems:
  Hands-on experience architecting and delivering AI/ML and LLM-driven applications, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt…