Forward Deployed AI Engineer - Assistant Vice President

The Applied AI and Agents Factory brings together ambitious engineers to turn advanced AI capabilities into production-ready solutions. Working directly with business and technology teams, you’ll tackle complex engineering challenges, build intelligent agents and take ideas from initial concept through to live deployment.

This is an opportunity to work at the cutting edge of AI engineering, developing systems that go beyond conversational tools to reason, plan and execute multi-step workflows. You’ll take ownership of the full engineering lifecycle, from agent architecture and orchestration to enterprise integration, security and observability.

With a strong focus on hands-on engineering, collaboration and rapid delivery, the Factory gives you the opportunity to solve challenging technical problems, influence architectural decisions and help shape reusable tools and engineering standards adopted across Citi.

The Forward Deployed Engineer (C12) is an agile, hands-on software engineer embedded within Line of Business pods. This role is responsible for building agent features and prototypes, constructing automated evaluation testbeds, optimizing prompts and data parsers, and automating continuous testing pipelines to guarantee the accuracy, safety, and reliability of production AI agents. 

Responsibilities: 

• Agent Prototyping & Feature Engineering: Develop and iterate on agent features, prompt templates, system instructions, few-shot examples, and data pre-processing scripts under the guidance of senior team members. 

• Automated Evaluation Testbeds: Build, calibrate, and execute automated evaluation test suites using enterprise evaluation studios and frameworks (measuring agent task completion, tool call correctness, semantic similarity, latency, and hallucination metrics). 

• Golden Dataset & Benchmark Curation: Curate, version, and maintain domain-specific golden evaluation datasets, synthetic benchmarks, and edge-case regression testbeds in collaboration with Line of Business domain experts. 

• CI/CD Test Pipeline Automation: Author and maintain automated test execution scripts within enterprise CI/CD pipelines, enforcing continuous evaluation gates prior to staging and production rollout. 

• Guardrail & Security Verification: Validate and test AI guardrail policies (prompt injection defenses, toxicity filters, PII redaction) across agent input/output pipelines to ensure safe operation. 

• Telemetry & Diagnostic Reporting: Monitor agent performance metrics, log evaluations, and generate prompt diagnostic reports to assist squad leads and business stakeholders in optimizing agent behavior. 

• Agile Pod Participation: Operate with increasing autonomy within fast-paced agile squads, actively contributing to sprint planning, standups, and codebase maintenance. 

• Appropriately assess risk when business decisions are made, demonstrating particular consideration for the firm's reputation and safeguarding Citi, its clients and assets, by driving compliance with applicable laws, rules and regulations, adhering to Policy, applying sound ethical judgment regarding personal behavior, conduct and business practices, and escalating, managing and reporting control issues with transparency. 

Qualifications: 

• Total Experience: 5+ years of relevant software engineering experience (or 2+ years with specialized focus in Python, Java, or Go and Generative AI application development). 

• Programming Skills: Solid Python, Java, or Go programming proficiency with hands-on experience integrating REST/gRPC APIs, Docker containers, and Git workflows. 

• AI & Evaluation Literacy: Working knowledge of Generative AI concepts, prompt engineering, and evaluation methodologies (e.g., semantic similarity, LLM-as-a-judge, benchmark test suites). 

• CI/CD & DevOps Basics: Experience working with automated test pipelines and CI/CD tools (e.g., Tekton, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Harness). 

• Communication & Collaboration: Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills with a methodical, detail-oriented approach to software quality and data integrity. 

Education: 

• Bachelor’s/University degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Data Science, or related quantitative discipline

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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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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.

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View Citi’s EEO Policy Statement and the Know Your Rights poster.