Senior AI Application Development Lead, Senior Vice President

Citi • New York, NY

3d • $176,720 - $265,080 • Hybrid

About The Position

Citi is seeking a Senior AI Application Development Lead to spearhead the architecture and delivery of intelligent, distributed systems at the heart of one of the world's premier financial institutions. In this role, you will lead an innovative engineering team within Citi Wealth Technology, driving strategic solutions across Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Distributed Computing for our global wealth and private banking client base.

This role is structured as 60% technical leadership, team mentorship, and architectural governance, and 40% hands-on systems design, prototyping, and core development. You will guide engineering squads, elevate development standards, and own end-to-end architecture across complex AI platforms — spanning modern LLM orchestration frameworks, cloud-native infrastructure, and scalable backend services.

Requirements

• 12+ years of progressive software engineering and architecture experience, with a proven track record of technical leadership and team mentorship.
• Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams, driving architectural decisions, conducting technical design reviews, and fostering engineering excellence.
• Deep hands-on proficiency in Python and/or Java, with strong database design and querying skills in SQL.
• Hands-on experience architecting and delivering AI/ML and LLM-driven applications, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, chunking strategies, and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or Vertex AI APIs).
• Strong expertise in designing distributed, event-driven architectures with streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka or Apache Flink.
• Substantial experience deploying and managing workloads on Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, with cloud platform expertise on AWS or GCP and Helm chart management.
• Strong foundation in relational database architecture (e.g., PostgreSQL) and caching/in-memory solutions (e.g., Redis).
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• A genuine commitment to writing clean, maintainable, and reusable software, paired with a strong sense of ownership and accountability for delivered outcomes.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with modern AI coding agents such as Devin or GitHub Copilot, or equivalent AI-assisted development tools used to accelerate engineering delivery.
• Practical experience or familiarity with modern frontend frameworks and libraries (e.g., React, Next.js, Angular, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS) to facilitate end-to-end prototyping and seamless collaboration with frontend teams.
• Exposure to multi-agent frameworks (e.g., Google ADK, CrewAI, AutoGen, LangGraph).
• Familiarity with workflow scheduling and orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow or AutoSys for managing complex data and processing pipelines.
• Experience configuring and interpreting observability tooling across Prometheus, Grafana, AppDynamics, and Splunk in a production environment.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical direction and architectural oversight across multiple engineering squads within Wealth Technology, ensuring adherence to enterprise design principles, scalability standards, and engineering best practices.
• Coach and mentor mid-level to senior engineers, conducting high-impact code reviews, technical deep-dives, and career growth coaching.
• Drive team adoption of modern developer productivity tools, including AI coding agents (such as GitHub Copilot and Devin), establishing frameworks for accelerated software delivery.
• Partner with business leaders, product managers, and cross-functional teams to translate strategic business requirements into robust, forward-looking technical roadmaps using Jira, Confluence, and GitHub.
• Champion DevSecOps principles, embedding automated testing, code quality, and security scanning (via Checkmarx, Snyk, Black Duck) across all CI/CD pipelines.
• Architect, prototype, and build production-grade AI/ML solutions using Python and Java, integrating LLM orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex) and leveraging Google Vertex AI agent services.
• Architect high-throughput, fault-tolerant event streams and data pipelines utilizing Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and modern distributed streaming patterns.
• Design and implement resilient, low-latency microservices and API gateways using FastAPI, Flask, or Spring Boot, backed by PostgreSQL and Redis.
• Deploy and manage resilient containerized applications on Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift, utilizing Helm charts, CI/CD automation (Jenkins, Tekton, Harness), and observability suites (Prometheus, Grafana, AppDynamics, Splunk).
• Embed security and code quality practices across the engineering lifecycle using tools such as Checkmarx, Snyk, and BlackDuck, ensuring all solutions meet enterprise security and compliance standards.

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