Release Management AI Engineering Lead - SVP

Citi • Tampa, FL

2d • $141,440 - $212,160 • Onsite

About The Position

This is a rare opportunity to sit at the intersection of AI engineering, release management, and platform modernization at one of the world's leading financial institutions. As a Release Management AI Engineering Lead, you will play a pivotal leadership role in designing and delivering intelligent release management capabilities — using AI and automation to eliminate toil, de-risk deployments, and accelerate the path from code to production. You will shape the technical strategy for AI-powered release pipelines, lead a team of engineers, and partner closely with product, security, and platform teams to deliver production-grade AI systems. You will have the opportunity to work with cutting-edge Generative AI technologies — including large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, Gemini, and Claude — embedding intelligent capabilities directly into our release and engineering workflows through prompt engineering, agentic design, and AI-driven automation. This is not just an engineering role. It is a leadership opportunity to define how AI reshapes the release management discipline at scale.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading AI/ML or platform engineering teams in product-focused environments
• Strong hands-on engineering experience in Python and/or Golang — building and shipping production systems
• Demonstrated experience with Generative AI and LLM technologies — including prompt engineering, LangChain, LlamaIndex, RAG pipelines, or equivalent frameworks
• Deep knowledge of release management and CI/CD — including tools such as Harness, GitHub Actions, Tekton, ArgoCD, or similar
• Experience with agentic AI architectures, AI workflow orchestration, and integrating AI into engineering systems
• Proven experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, container-based micro-services, and cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes / OpenShift)
• Hands-on experience with DevSecOps practices, SDLC controls, and security-by-design principles
• A strategic thinker with a hands-on approach — comfortable moving between high-level architecture and deep technical delivery
• A growth mindset with a genuine passion for AI, automation, and engineering innovation
• Strong communication and influencing skills — able to engage technical teams, senior stakeholders, and cross-functional partners with clarity and conviction
• An advocate for inclusion, diversity, and psychological safety in all its forms
• A self-starter who thrives in ambiguity, brings structure to complexity, and energises the people around them
• Pragmatic and risk-aware, with a creative approach to solving hard engineering problems
• Committed to a culture of continuous improvement and data-driven decision-making
• Enthusiastic about knowledge sharing, mentoring, and building high-performing teams

Nice To Haves

• Experience with MLOps platforms and model deployment pipelines (e.g., MLflow, Kubeflow, SageMaker, Vertex AI)
• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Loki, Prometheus)
• Exposure to policy-as-code and compliance-as-code frameworks (e.g., OPA, Rego)
• Experience in regulated industries (financial services, fintech) with exposure to audit, controls, or governance functions
• Background working in agile, product-oriented engineering teams with a continuous delivery mindset

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end release management strategy, defining standards and tooling for CI/CD, deployment orchestration, and release governance
• Drive the adoption of Harness, progressive delivery (blue/green, canary), and everything-as-code principles across engineering teams
• Define and enforce SDLC controls, ensuring release processes are secure, auditable, and compliant with Citi's standards
• Lead the design and delivery of AI-powered release management systems, including intelligent deployment gates, anomaly detection, predictive rollback, and LLM-assisted release orchestration
• Architect and implement agentic AI workflows that automate release readiness assessments, change risk analysis, and compliance checks
• Evaluate and integrate AI/ML models into production release workflows, ensuring safety, reliability, and auditability
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of AI and platform engineers — fostering a culture of technical excellence, psychological safety, and continuous improvement
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders — product managers, security engineers, platform teams, and business analysts — to align release capabilities with organizational goals
• Drive cultural change by championing AI-augmented engineering practices and encouraging critical, creative thinking about controls and processes
• Design and build scalable, production-grade backend systems using Python and/or Golang, integrating with cloud-native and containerized infrastructure
• Ensure all platforms are secure, observable, and compliant with Citi's DevSecOps and SDLC requirements
• Champion best practices in system design including distributed systems, event-driven architectures, micro-services, and API-first design

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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed