AI Strategic Partnerships Lead, SVP
About The Position
The AI Strategic Partnerships Lead sits within Citi's Head of AI Organization and serves as a dynamic business leader and execution-driven orchestrator for external AI technology partnerships. This SVP-level leader is accountable for executing on Citi's enterprise AI strategy by actively scouting, rigorously evaluating, and driving external AI technologies across the full partnership lifecycle — from initial ecosystem discovery and PoC validation to compliant, enterprise-scale production rollout. This role combines strong commercial and investment acumen with either AI product management discipline or Generative AI engineering fluency. The ideal candidate operates as a proactive business leader who understands the venture capital and startup landscape, navigates complex enterprise environments, and collaborates hand-in-hand with dedicated Project Managers to move partner technologies through rigorous technical, operational, and governance milestones into business unit adoption. Unlike pure corporate development or research roles, this position is focused on operationalizing high-value AI solutions across Citi's global business lines. The leader bridges external innovation (startups, frontier labs, VCs, accelerators) with internal delivery teams, ensuring that every partnership addresses validated Business Unit needs, meets strict regulatory and risk standards, and delivers measurable enterprise ROI.
Requirements
- 10+ years' experience in technology strategic partnerships, AI product management, or technology delivery within top-tier financial institutions, or prior experience in corporate venture capital, innovation labs, accelerators, or high-growth AI startups.
- Demonstrated expertise executing partnership lifecycles, including scouting, technical evaluations, commercial structuring, PoC execution, and scaling third-party software into enterprise production.
- Strong background in either AI Product Management or Generative AI Engineering, with working knowledge of LLMs (proprietary and open-weight), RAG architectures, agentic frameworks, fine-tuning, and model evaluation metrics.
- Exceptional ability to synthesize complex technical, commercial, and operational findings into actionable executive recommendations.
- Bachelor’s degree/University degree or equivalent experience
Nice To Haves
- Master’s degree preferred
Responsibilities
- Proactively scout and evaluate emerging AI startups, foundation model providers, agentic platform vendors, RAG/data infrastructure providers, and specialized tooling to identify high-potential solutions that address Citi's business challenges.
- Manage the end-to-end partnership lifecycle — encompassing initial market mapping, technology and commercial assessment, investment/licensing awareness, contractual alignment, sandbox onboarding, and long-term vendor relationship management.
- Leverage strong knowledge of the venture capital, accelerator, and startup investment landscape to gauge company maturity, financial viability, product velocity, and enterprise readiness.
- Translate Citi’s overarching AI strategic priorities into structured, time-bound execution plans, ensuring vendor initiatives directly advance target business outcomes.
- Design, oversee, and run structured sandbox evaluations, proof-of-concepts (PoCs), and objective competitive bake-offs with clearly defined performance, latency, cost, and security benchmarks.
- Collaborate closely with Project Managers, enterprise architects, and engineering teams to shepherd validated partner technologies from successful PoC completion through full deployment and operationalization in production environments.
- Apply deep AI product management principles or Gen AI engineering fluency (understanding LLM architectures, context management, prompt/agent orchestration, vector stores, and synthetic data) to direct technical teams, validate architecture assumptions, and stress-test vendor capabilities.
- Act as the primary engagement partner for Business Unit leadership, understanding their operational workflows, pain points, and commercial targets to align the right partner solutions to real business demand.
- Serve as the chief facilitator across Risk, Compliance, Information Security, Model Risk Management (MRM), Legal, and Procurement to guide startup partners through Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) and onboarding requirements.
- Develop clear, non-technical business cases, executive briefings, and ROI models for senior leadership, articulating the business value, trade-offs, and scaling pathway for each partnership.
Benefits
- medical, dental & vision coverage
- 401(k)
- life, accident, and disability insurance
- wellness programs
- paid time off packages, including planned time off (vacation), unplanned time off (sick leave), and paid holidays
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Executive
