Job Description
We are Citi’s Application, Platform and Engineering group, a start-up with the
exciting mission of shaping the direction of travel for the entire bank under
the Chief Technology Office. We define the AI and engineering strategy for the
bank. We are a team of talented engineers, product managers, and SMEs, taking
ambiguous concepts and making them real by engineering cutting-edge products
at planetary scale.
We are solely focused on the most modern technology and engineering
disciplines: generative AI, cloud-native architectures, security, modern app
stacks, open-source, and the latest and greatest in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Generative AI is a rapidly evolving space. As a Staff Engineer, you will be
the technical anchor and visionary for this domain. We ask that you share with
us examples of projects that you have architected and scaled. Ideally, these
examples should showcase clever distributed architectures, systematic
evaluation of LLM behaviours at scale, and your ability to drive technical
consensus across large organizations.
Technical Skillset Required:
14+ Years of Hands on experience is a must have.
Tech Skillsets required for the role
:
Go microservices, React 19+/TypeScript, OpenShift/Kubernetes,
MongoDB/Redis/S3, REST/gRPC/WebSockets, Claude/Gemini/proprietary LLMs,
OAuth/JWT/Vault, GitOps CI/CD, Prometheus/Grafana/ELK.
You might be a good fit if you:
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Bring distinguished, deep-dive software engineering expertise and a track
record of architectural leadership.
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Thrive in a results-driven environment, where flexibility fuels impact and
your technical decisions shape the enterprise.
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Are a game-changer and thought leader, ready to step beyond your designated
role to influence the broader engineering culture.
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Love the synergy of pair programming and hands-on coding—you lead from the
front and stay close to the codebase.
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Seize the opportunity to architect machine learning and GenAI applications
at an unprecedented global scale.
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Possess a relentless passion to push the boundaries of machine learning and
generative AI, bringing your knowledge to shape Citi’s future.
What you’ll do within the team:
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Engineering at scale:
You will build scaled, robust services and platforms centred around
generative AI. This may also include developing CLIs, SDKs, runtimes and
more.
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Thought Leadership:
Drive architectural vision and lead the 0-1 build of foundational,
enterprise-grade AI platforms and products.
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System Design:
Design and build high-quality, highly reliable, and secure distributed
systems with developer and user experience at the center.
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Strategic Direction:
Create "firsts" in the Generative AI space for Citi, acting as a core member
of the team that defines the strategic technical direction for the entire
bank.
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Scale & Iterate:
Continually iterate and scale Generative AI products to handle massive
throughput, whilst anticipating and listening to the complex needs of
internal customers.
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Cross-Org Influence:
You must be able to drive technical alignment across multiple engineering
organizations, breaking down silos to deliver cohesive AI capabilities.
Experience That Will Help You Succeed In This Role:
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Mastery of Modern Stacks:
Expert-level fluency in Golang is a must-have, with deep experience building
concurrent, high-throughput systems. (Python is a strong desirable
addition).
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Cloud-Native & Infrastructure:
Deep expertise in the Kubernetes ecosystem, container orchestration, and
modern security paradigms (e.g., Gatekeeper, zero-trust).
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Applied GenAI:
Understanding of language models, fine-tuning methodologies, and RAG
architectures, JIT context retrieval strategies will be useful.
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AI Infrastructure:
Proven experience designing control planes, sandboxing systems for AI
experimentation, and managing large-scale vector stores and search
algorithms.
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Data Engineering:
Extensive experience in large-scale ETL development and data pipeline
architecture.
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Security & Governance:
Experience maintaining and/or contributing to bug bounty, responsible
disclosure programs, and AI safety/guardrail implementations.
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Startup Agility:
Experience leading technical initiatives within fast-paced startup
environments or driving startup-like agility within a large enterprise.
What We Believe In:
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We do not have boundaries between engineering and research; we expect our
technical leaders to bridge the gap and contribute to both.
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We take a product-focused approach and care deeply about building solutions
that are robust, scalable, and easy to use.
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We enjoy working in a fast-paced team tackling cutting-edge problems by
constantly testing, learning, and adapting.
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We enjoy pair programming for our products; we are lean in our approach and
actively remove bureaucracy where we see it.
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We believe in delivering fast, iterating, and pivoting as we go, rather than
defining the perfect solution upfront.