Director, Applied AI & Agentic Platform Engineering

Our Vision

We are building a next-generation system that reimagines banking workflows for our Corporate, Commercial, and Investment Bankers. Our vision is to empower them with a revolutionary Agentic AI Platform, featuring intelligent, autonomous agents that streamline processes, uncover new opportunities, and deepen client relationships—ultimately leading to significant productivity gains and increased wallet share. We are looking for a visionary, hands-on engineering leader to build and scale the platform that will make this a reality.

The Role

As the Director of Agentic Platform Engineering, you will be a player-coach responsible for the technical vision, architecture, and execution of this greenfield platform. You will join a world-class engineering team being built from the ground up, while remaining deeply technical and contributing to the core development of the platform. This is a unique opportunity to blend strategic leadership with hands-on engineering to build a product that will have a direct and measurable impact on the front lines of our business.

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Architecture & Development: Lead the design, architecture, and hands-on development of a scalable, secure, and resilient agentic AI platform from concept to production.
• Technical Leadership & Hands-On Engineering: Serve as the lead engineer and technical authority, guiding critical decisions on frameworks, technologies, and infrastructure. You will be expected to write code, build prototypes, and lead by example.
• Team Building & Mentorship: Recruit, hire, and mentor a high-performing, agile team of software and machine learning engineers. Foster a culture of innovation, excellence, and accountability.
• Strategic Roadmapping: Partner closely with product management and senior business leaders in banking to define the product strategy and technical roadmap. Translate complex business needs into elegant technical solutions.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner effectively with horizontal AI platform teams, enterprise architecture, and external vendor partners to leverage existing capabilities, influence roadmaps, and accelerate delivery.
• AI & ML Integration: Drive the strategy for integrating and operationalizing Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic frameworks (e.g., Google ADK, LangChain,), and other AI/ML technologies to solve real-world banking challenges.
• Operational Excellence: Implement and champion best-in-class engineering practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and robust monitoring to ensure enterprise-grade reliability.
• Business Impact: Define, measure, and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) related to platform adoption, user productivity, and the ultimate impact on business outcomes like wallet share growth.
• Compliance & Security: Ensure the platform adheres to the highest standards of data privacy, security, and regulatory compliance required in the banking industry.

Qualifications & Experience

• Education: Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Experience: Significant experience in software engineering, with proven years in a leadership role, leading high-performing engineering teams.
• Hands-On Leader: Proven experience as a "player-coach" who can lead from the front, contribute to the codebase, and mentor junior and senior engineers.
• Platform Building: A strong track record of designing, building, and launching scalable, distributed, cloud-native platforms from the ground up.
• Domain Knowledge: Experience in the financial services industry (Corporate Banking, Investment Banking, FinTech) is a significant plus. An understanding of banking workflows and data is highly desirable.
• Communication Skills: Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and to articulate a clear technical vision that aligns with business goals.

Technical Skills

• AI / GenAI / Agentic Platforms
• LLM & Agentic Frameworks: Deep expertise in building production-grade agentic systems using GCP as primary (ADK, Vertex AI)
• Multi-Agent Systems: Hands-on experience designing and implementing multi-agent architectures

(task decomposition, coordination, orchestration, and agent-to-agent (A2A) interaction patterns)

• * Model Context Protocol (MCP) & Integrations: Experience integrating agents with enterprise tools and data sources using MCP or equivalent context-sharing patterns
• Knowledge Graphs & Reasoning: Building and leveraging knowledge graphs for context enrichment, reasoning, and workflow automation
• RAG & Knowledge Systems: End-to-end RAG pipelines using enterprise search + vector stores (e.g., Elastic, Pinecone) with grounding, evaluation, and optimization
• Model Lifecycle & Governance: Model evaluation, monitoring, prompt/version control, and Responsible AI / MRM compliance

• Enterprise AI Integration & Data
• API- and event-driven integration of AI into enterprise workflows
• Data platforms: Databricks, Spark, Snowflake; streaming via Kafka

• Backend & Distributed Systems
• Languages: Python (expert), Java/Spring Boot (enterprise standard), Go (plus)
• Architecture: Microservices, domain-driven design, event-driven systems
• APIs & Integration: REST/gRPC; Apigee, Kong
• Data & Messaging: PostgreSQL/Oracle, MongoDB/Cassandra, Kafka

• Cloud & DevSecOps
• Cloud Platforms: Strong experience with GCP (preferred); working knowledge of AWS; Azure exposure optional (not a dependency)
• Containers: Docker, Kubernetes (GKE/EKS)
• IaC: Terraform
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Jenkins
• Observability: Splunk, ELK, Prometheus, Grafana

• Security & Compliance
• Secure coding, API security, Zero Trust
• Data privacy, encryption, access control
• Regulatory compliance and AI governance (MRM)

What We Offer

• A leadership role in a high-priority, transformative initiative with executive visibility.
• The opportunity to build a cutting-edge AI platform from scratch.
• A competitive compensation package including salary, bonus, and benefits.
• A collaborative and innovative culture that values technical excellence and business impact.

What we’ll provide you

By joining Citi London, you will not only be part of a business casual workplace with a hybrid working model (up to 2 days working at home per week), but also receive a competitive base salary (which is annually reviewed), and enjoy a whole host of additional benefits such as:

• 27 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)

• A discretional annual performance related bonus

• Private Medical Care & Life Insurance

• Employee Assistance Program

• Pension Plan

• Paid Parental Leave

• Special discounts for employees, family, and friends

• Access to an array of learning and development resources

Visit our Global Benefits page to learn more.

Alongside these benefits Citi is committed to ensuring our workplace is where everyone feels comfortable coming to work as their whole self, every day. We want the best talent around the world to be energized to join us, motivated to stay and empowered to thrive.

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## Job Family Group:

Technology

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## Job Family:

Applications Development

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## Time Type:

Full time

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## Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

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## Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

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